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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2016
“The constant reference to this barleycorn measure (which is seldom, if ever, omitted) induced me to try what it really would make. There is some difference between the breadths of barleycorns. A certain statement of Thevenot (cited in the History of Astronomy, Lib. Usef. Kn.) makes the breadths of 144 grains of oriental barley give 1½ French feet; at which rate 64 would only give 8 53 inches English. A sample from a London shop gave me (when the largest grains were picked out) 33 to just more than five inches. Some other samples, procured from two different parts of England as the finest which could be got, gave 33 to 5 inches, 33 to 5.1 inches, and 33 to 5.1 inches. The average of these is 9.8 inches to 64 grain-breadths : a result which coincides more nearly than could have been expected with the following determinations.
page note 69 * Of Fernel’s De proportionibus Libri duo, 1528, De Morgan says: “A book on proportion of this date is in great part filled with Boethian arithmetic. This book deserves attention: its author had a much better grasp of Euclid than most of his contemporaries.
page note 71 * “Those who have tried to make the lengths of three barleycorns into an inch will probably think little of this mode of judging. But 1 observed that in samples of very different apparent fineness, the diflerence was in the length of the corns, the breadths hardly varying at all.”
page note 74 * [1813].