Pullman herald. [volume] (Pullman, W.T. [Wash.]) 1888-1989, 1889-01-26
INCH AND OUNCE.
The Derivation of These Two Standards
of Measurement.

oil meaSuroment.
| AS the Jews had a mystical rever-
ence for seven, and the ancient Welsh
and Celts for three, and the Greeks a
perfect philosophy constructed out of
the harmonies of all sorts of numbers,
so the Romans fell back upon scale
of-or. more properly, upon a scale
with a base of-six. Accordingly, as
they divided the pound into twelve
ounces, so they also divided the foot,
which was the standard of lineal
measure. into twelve sections, and
they called these sections unci@, too.
But how did they get the inch orig
inallyp it may be asked. Rather, how
did they get the pound? for that, and
not the inch, is the unit. There seems
to be no precise information on this
point. They would divide any unit
into twelfths, and a prevailing notion
was at one time the linear uncia was
really the original, and was then
transferred as a name to a weight.
This, though plausible, is hardly the
case. Sometimes. especially in old
books, written when philology was not
what it is now. it was the fashion to
derive uncie from the same word in
the Greek, because, after the revival
of letters in Europe, the admiration of
the Greek became so great that when
ever similar words were found in it
and some other language it was al
ways said that the other language bor-
rowed them from the Greek. This is
very far from being always so, and in
the present instance the very reverse
appears to have occurred. The ounce
is literally the twelfth, and thus we
see at once the sense of speaking of an
ounce of land and an inch of milk, just
as of an inch of a mans will or an
inch of interest for money on a loan.
1t was always the twelfth of a unit;
twelfth of an hour; twelfth of a
jugerum, that half-acre which the two
oxen plowed in a day; twelfth of a
sextarius, or equivalent to our pint;
twelfth of the entire hereditis;
twelfth of the principal lent on time
when it was money at usury-that Is,
over elSnI per CeHG-
1t is, accordingly, as much Of mis-
take to say that the primary meaning
of the word is linear, which is to say
that it comes straight from the Greek
into the Latin and thence on to us. The
riddle is plain enough when we get to
the true origin of che word-a twelfth.
Once, indeed, it used to be said that
the true origin was that the word
meant a thumb breadth, because its
equivalent, pollex, in linear measure,
was often used in its place. But this
is not the case Some of the old Latins
themselves, moreover, thought it
meant literally the unit; but even this
will not hold beside the proper signif-
cation of the twelfth.
The pound weight really never di-
vided by inches or ounces, it was di-
vided by twelfths. by halves, by thirds,
by fourths and by sixths. And here,
again, we see what a convenient base
a system of twelfths is for division
compared with a system of tenths,
which could only be divided evenly in
two ways-by two and five. For seven
ounces they use the literal seven
twelfths; for eight ounces they said
two parts-that is, two thirds; for nine,
wanting a fourth, which with us reads
like a roundabout way of expressing
three-quarters; for ten, wanting a
sixth; for eleven, wanting twelfth
Boston Herald.