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8 NATURE OF CAPITAL AND INCOME [Crap I

§ 3

In the definition of wealth were included two attributes:
wealth is material; and, it is owned. These attributes,
materiality and appropriation, need to be considered separately.
 The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to
the former.
An important and useful result of the materiality of
wealth is that it provides a basis for the physical measurement
 of wealth. Wealth is of many kinds, and each kind
is measured in its own proper physical unit. These units
have been handed down to us from various sources and in
great diversity, but all of them are in the last analysis
arbitrary.
Many kinds of wealth are measured by weight-uniis.
This is true of coal, iron, beef, and in fact, of most
“commodities.” Each unit consists of the weight of
some particular piece of matter which is adopted for convenience
 as a standard. For instance, the English pound is
simply a lump of platinum kept in London and called arbitrarily
 the pound.
Many articles are not so conveniently measured by
weight-units as by space-units, whether of volume, area, or
length. Thus we have, for volume, milk measured by the
quart, wheat by the bushel, wood by the cord, and gas by
the cubic foot ; for areas, we have lumber sold by the square
foot and land by the acre; for length, we have rope, wire,
ribbons, and cloth measured in feet and yards. All these
units of length, area, and volume are also quite arbitrary
or conventional. The definition of the English yard, for
instance, is an imaginary line drawn between two small
dots on gold plugs in a particular brass rod in London.
Many articles exist in more or less definite units which
need only to be counted, as for instance, eggs or oranges,
which are measured by the dozen. Similarly, writing paper
is reckoned by the quire; pencils and screws by the gross.