CHAPTER V ENGLISH LINEAR MEASURES 1. THE YARD, THE FOOT, THE INCH The term Yard, the Old English ‘gerde’ or ‘yerde,’ a wand or rod, became specially applied to a wand of 3 feet, or 4 spans; from this double mode of division and from its convenient length the cloth-yard of 3 feet became generally used. It has the convenience of being a half-fathom, and of being divisible not only into feet and inches, but also sexdecimally into units which are familiar as limb-lengths of the cubit and span system. The half-yard corresponds to the Cubit. The quarter-yard is a Span.[12] Footnote 12: The usual dimensions of bricks are a span by a half-span, by a nail. The eighth is a Finger; women constantly measure linen approximately by the length of the bent middle finger. The sixteenth is a Nail; this is the length of the half-finger, the last two joints of the middle finger.[13] Footnote 13: The story of the Nail will be found in Chap. XX. While the yard is lawfully divided into halves, quarters, eighths, and nails, it may also, as a measure of 3 feet, be divided into 36 inches. Yard-measures are usually divided in both ways, on one side into 16 nails, on the other into inches. It is customary to say either a yard and a quarter, or 45 inches, or 3 feet 9 inches. Or to say either 58 inches or 4 feet 10 inches; but it is not customary to say a yard and 22 inches. We cease to use the yard as unit when we cannot express its fractions sexdecimally. The Foot is lawfully divided into 12 inches; but there is nothing to prevent it being divided decimally, or otherwise, as convenient. The Inch is divided according to convenience, either Sexdecimally, into halves, quarters, &c., down to sixty-fourths. This is the usual division. Duodecimally, into 12 lines. Decimally, into tenths and hundredths. Steel foot-rules usually show all three of these scales. Some trades may have special scales. Thus type-founders divide the Inch into 6 ‘picas’ each = 2 lines, and the ‘pica’ into 12 points each = 1/6 line or 1/72 inch. Nonpareil type is 6 points; Brevier is 8 points. 2. STANDARDS OF THE LINEAR MEASURES Tables of measures, from the earliest, about 1500, down to quite recent times, usually began by stating that ‘Three barley-corns make an inch’ or that ‘Geographical measures begin at a barley-corn and increase upward to a league,’ &c. King David I of Scotland (_c._ 1150) is credited with the pronouncement that the Scots inch was to be the mean measure of ‘the thowmys of iij men, that is to say an mekill man and a man of messurabil statur and of a lytell man. The thoums are to be messurit at the rut of the nayll.’ But no more in Scotland than in England, or elsewhere, has the inch ever been anything but a division of the foot.