MONEY. The franc weighs five grammes. It is made of nine-tenths of silver and one-tenth of cop per. Its tenth part is called a decime, and its hundredth part a centime.
As already stated the divisions of these measures are all uniform, namely, by tens, or decimal frac tions ; they may, therefore, be written as such. Instead of writing, 1 metre and 1-tenth of a metre, we may write, 1 m. 1.
2 metres and 8-tenths,-2 m. 8.
10 metres and 4-hundredths,-10 m. 04.
7 litres, 1-tenth, and 2-hundredths,--7 lit. 12, etc. Names have been given to each of these divisions of the principal unit ; but these names always in dicate the value of the fraction and the unit from which it is derived. To the name of the unit have been prefixed, deck, for tenth, centi, for hundredth, and milli, for thousandth. They are thus ex pressed: a decimetre, a decilitre, a decigramme, a decisters, a declare, a centimetre, a centilitre, a cen tigramme, etc. The facility with which the divi sions of the unit are reduced to the same expression is very apparent.
As it may sometimes be necessary to express large quantities of units, collections have been made of them in tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thou sands, etc., to which prefixes derived from the Greek have been given namely, deca, for tens; hecto, for hundreds ; kilo, for thousands ; and myria, for tens of thousands ; they are thus ex pressed : s. decametre, a decalitre, etc. ; a hecto metre, a hectogramme, etc. ; a kilometre, a kilo gramme, etc.
The above act of congress gives the equivalents thus: The Mitre is 39.37 in.
Litre is .908 quarts, dry measure, or 1.0567 quarts, wine measure.
Are is 119.6 square yards.
Gramme is 15.432 grains avoirdupois.
The Stere Is 35.317 cubic feet.
As to certain measures under Mexican grants, see Ainsa v. U. S., 161 U. S. 219, 16 Sup. Ct. 544, 4P L. Ed. 673.
See WEIGHT.