As to the precise foot or pound, I do not look upon it to be very material, in chemistry at least. Either the common English foot may be adopted according to your proposal, which has the advantage that a cubic foot is exactly 1,000 ounces, consequently the present foot and ounce would be retained; or a pendulum which vibrates 100 times a minute may be adopted for the standard, which would make the foot 14.2 of our present inches, and the cubic foot would be very exactly a bushel, and would weigh 101 of the present pounds, so that the present pound would not be much altered. But I think that by this scheme the foot would be too large, and that the inconvenience of changing all the foot measures and things depending on them, would be much greater than changing all the pounds, bushels, gallons, etc. I therefore give the preference to those plans which retain the foot and ounce. The war of the standards still rages--metric, or decimal, or no change. What each nation has is good enough for it in the opinion of many of its people. Some day an international commission will doubtless assemble to bring order out of chaos. As far as the English-speaking race is concerned, it seems that a decided improvement could readily be affected with very trifling, indeed scarcely perceptible, changes. Especially is this so with money values. Britain could merge her system with those of Canada and America, by simply making her "pound" the exact value of the American five dollars, it being now only ten pence less; her silver coinage one and two shillings equal to quarter- and half-dollars, the present coin to be recoined upon presentation, but meanwhile to pass current. Weights and measures are more difficult to assimilate. Science being world-wide, and knowing no divisions, should use uniform terms. Alas! at the distance of nearly a century and a half we seem no nearer the prospect of a system of universal weights and measures than in Watt's day, but Watt's idea is not to be lost sight of for all that. He was a seer who often saw what was to come. We have referred to the absence of holidays in Watt's strenuous life, but Birmingham was remarkable for a number of choice spirits who formed the celebrated Lunar Society, whose members were all devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and mutually agreeable to one another. Besides Watt and Boulton, there were Dr. Priestley, discoverer of oxygen gas, Dr. Darwin, Dr. Withering, Mr. Keir, Mr. Galton, Mr. Wedgwood of Wedgwood ware fame, who had monthly dinners at their respective houses--hence the "Lunar" Society. Dr. Priestley, discoverer of oxygen, who arrived in Birmingham in 1780, has repeatedly mentioned the great pleasure he had in having Watt for a neighbor. He says: