Even crystals, which are so definite in geometrical form, are variable with respect to their absolute dimensions.

Among the works of man we sometimes find a certain degree of uniformity.

There is a uniformity among the different bullets which are cast in the same mould, and the different copies of a book printed from the same type.

If we examine the coins, or the weights and measures, of a civilized country, we find a uniformity, which is produced by careful adjustment to standards made and provided by the state.  The degree of uniformity of these national standards is a measure of that spirit of justice in the nation which has enacted laws to regulate them and appointed officers to test them.

This subject is one in which we, as a scientific body, take a warm interest; and you are all aware of the vast amount of scientific work which has been expended, and profitably expended, in providing weights and measures for commercial and scientific purposes.

The earth has been measured as a basis for a permanent standard of length, and every property of metals has been investigated to guard against any alteration of the material standards when made.  To weigh or measure any thing with modern accuracy, requires a course of experiment and calculation in which almost every branch of physics and mathematics is brought into requisition.

Yet, after all, the dimensions of our earth and its time of rotation, though, relatively to our present means of comparison, very permanent, are not so by any physical necessity.  The earth might contract by cooling, or it might be enlarged by a layer of meteorites falling on it, or its rate of revolution might slowly slacken, and yet it would continue to be as much a planet as before.

But a molecule, say of hydrogen, if either its mass or its time of vibration were to be altered in the least, would no longer be a molecule of hydrogen.

If, then, we wish to obtain standards of length, time, and mass which shall be absolutely permanent, we must seek them not in the dimensions, or the motion, or the mass of our planet, but in the wave-length, the period of vibration, and the absolute mass of these imperishable and unalterable and perfectly similar molecules.

When we find that here, and in the starry heavens, there are innumerable multitudes of little bodies of exactly the same mass, so many, and no more, to the grain, and vibrating in exactly the same time, so many times, and no more, in a second, and when we reflect that no power in nature can now alter in the least either the mass or the period of any one of them, we seem to have advanced along the path of natural knowledge to one of those points at which we must accept the guidance of that faith by which we understand that “that which is seen was not made of things which do appear.”