From the earliest periods, special attention has been paid to units of quantity, and, in the ignorance of more constant quantities, the governors of men have offered their own persons as measures; hence the fathom, yard, pace, cubit, foot, span, hand, digit, pound, and pint. It is quite probable that the Egyptians first gave to such measures the permanent form of government standards, and that copies of them were carried by commerce, and otherwise, to surrounding nations. In time, these became vitiated, and should have been verified by their originals; but for distant nations this was not convenient; moreover, the governors of those nations had a variety of reasons for preferring to verify them by their own persons. Thus they became doubly vitiated; yet, as they were not duly enforced, the people pleased themselves, so that almost every market-town and fair had its own weights and measures; and as, in the regulation of coins, governments, like the people, pleased themselves, so that almost every nation had a peculiar currency, the general result was, that with the laws and the practices of the governors and the governed, neither of whom pursued a legitimate course, confusion reigned supreme. Indeed, a system of weights, measures, and coins, with a constant and real standard, and corresponding multiples and divisions, though indulged in as a day-dream by a few, has never yet been presented to the world in a definite form; and as, in the absence of such a system, a corresponding system of numeration and notation can be of no real use, the probability is, that neither the one nor the other has ever been fully idealized. On the contrary, the present base is taken to be a fixed fact, of the order of the laws of the Medes and Persians; so much so, that, when the great question is asked, one of the leading questions of the age,--How is this mass of confusion to be brought into harmony?--the reply is,--It is only necessary to adopt one constant and real standard, with decimal multiples and divisions, and a corresponding nomenclature, and the work is done: a reply that is still persisted in, though the proposition has been fairly tried, and clearly proved to be impracticable.