From John Aitken
If you look at Charles Darwin’s notebooks, you find meticulously recorded
measurements such as 3 32/64 inch.
As a schoolboy I would have been taught to simplify this to 3 1/2 inch, one
half inch being preferred to the cumbersome thirty-two sixty-fourths of an inch.
However, Darwin recorded the length in sixty-fourths to indicate the level of
precision of his measurements.
Helensburgh, Scotland
