Note 37 — CHAP. IV.

Accurate and perfectly authentic copies of the yard and pound, executed in platina, and hermetically sealed in glass, should be deposited deep in the interior of the massive stone-work of some great public building, whence they could only be rescued with a degree of difficulty sufficient to preclude their being disturbed unless on some very high and urgent occasion. The fact should be publicly recorded, and its memory preserved by an inscription. Indeed, how much valuable and useful information of the actual existing state of arts and knowledge at any period might be transmitted to posterity in a distinct, tangible, and imperishable form, if, instead of the absurd and useless deposition of a few coins and medals under the foundations of buildings, specimens of ingenious implements or condensed statements of scientific truths, or processes in arts and manufactures, were substituted. Will books infallibly preserve to a remote posterity all that we may desire should be hereafter known of ourselves and our discoveries, or all that posterity would wish to know? and may not a useless ceremony be thus transformed into an act of enrolment in a perpetual archive of what we most prize, and acknowledge to be most valuable?