At the end of the eighteenth century, Delambre, in his work _Sur la Base du Systeme metrique decimal_, clearly gives us to understand that magnitudes of the order of the hundredth of a millimetre appear to him incapable of observation, even in scientific researches of the highest precision.
At the present date the International Bureau of Weights and Measures guarantees, in the determination of a standard of length compared with the metre, an approximation of two or three ten-thousandths of a millimetre, and even a little more under certain circumstances.
This very remarkable progress is due to the improvements in the method of comparison on the one hand, and in the manufacture of the standard on the other.

M.Benoit rightly points out that a kind of competition has been set up between the standard destined to represent the unit with its subdivisions and multiples and the instrument charged with observing it, comparable, up to a certain point, with that which in another order of ideas goes on between the gun and the armour-plate.
The measuring instrument of to-day is an instrument of comparison constructed with meticulous care, which enables us to do away with causes of error formerly ignored, to eliminate the action of external phenomena, and to withdraw the experiment from the influence of even the personality of the observer.

This standard is no longer, as formerly, a flat rule, weak and fragile, but a rigid bar, incapable of deformation, in which the material is utilised in the best conditions of resistance.

For a standard with ends has been substituted a standard with marks, which permits much more precise definition and can be employed in optical processes of observation alone; that is, in processes which can produce in it no deformation and no alteration.
Moreover, the marks are traced on the plane of the neutral fibres[2] exposed, and the invariability of their distance apart is thus assured, even when a change is made in the way the rule is supported.
[Footnote 2: The author seems to refer to the fact that in the standard metre, the measurement is taken from the central one of three marks at each end of the bar.

The transverse section of the bar is an X, and the reading is made by a microscope .-- ED.] Thanks to studies thus systematically pursued, we have succeeded in the course of a hundred years in increasing the precision of measures in the proportion of a thousand to one, and we may ask ourselves whether such an increase will continue in the future.