I have had some personal experience of the inconvenience of these weights. For years I had to weigh recruits and other soldiers, recording their weights in pounds with this inconvenient set of weights. To get the weight of a man of 152 lb. I had to reckon 2 × 56 lb. + 28 + 7 + 4 + 1 lb. Errors were necessarily frequent when many weighings had to be rapidly done, so I had a set of decimal weights made—20, 10, 5 lb.—and all trouble ceased. But these weights were not lawful, at least for trade purposes. There was, however, another lawful unit, the Cental, that is, the original English Cwt., brought back to England from North America by the corn-trade. Commerce demanded the recognition of the Cental and got it in 1879. In 1902, the tobacco-trade in Liverpool, annoyed at the inconvenience of the lawful units of weight, as inconvenient for the wholesale tobacco-warehouse as for my military purposes, moved the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce to get the Board of Trade to allow them to use a half-cental weight; a whole cental, the only lawful unit of the kind, being too heavy for handling. In reply to this request, it was suggested that a nest of weights, 28 + 14 + 7 + 1 lb. = 50 lb. might be used. To this the tobacco-trade objected, and after correspondence, the use of a 50 lb. weight was granted. Then they requested permission to use smaller fractions of the cental, in fact a decimal series of 20, 10, 5 lb. And they obtained it. So, thanks to the perseverance of the Liverpool tobacco-merchants and Chamber of Commerce, the decimal fractions of the Cental are now lawful weights, and no one need use the inconvenient 14 lb. stone series. 5. WOOL AND LEAD WEIGHT _Wool Weight_ The revenue of the Plantagenet kings being largely derived from duties on the export of wool, the weight of the sack was fixed by statute. By 31 Edw. I ‘the sack of wool ought to weigh 28 stone of 12-1/2 lb.’ = 350 lb. By 14 Edw. III ‘the sack shall contain 26 stone and each stone 14 lb.’ = 364 lb., i.e. 2 weys of 13 stone. This regulation was supported by other statutes, in 1389 and 1496, and appears to have had due effect, for it is the standard at the present time: 26 stone or 13 ‘tods.’ Why was this particular weight ordered? Possibly because the sack thus corresponded nearly to the skippund (ship-pound) of the Baltic trade and of Scotland, a weight of 20 lispund each of 16 Norse Troy pounds or of 20 pounds of light standard = 352 to 375 lb. The Baltic skippund at the present day is about 350 lb. In Scotland the sack of wool was ordered to be 24 stone, which was equivalent to 26 English stone, in proportion to the heavier weight of the Scots pound.