| Type | Interpretation, contested |
|---|---|
| Advanced by | Capitana Shantel Dugua |
| Test pair | Vasles / Châteauneuf-sur-Sarthe |
| Principal objection | Requires an unstated route |
| Status | Neither adopted nor withdrawn |
Kilometre reading
The kilometre reading is the proposal that the figures in the Appendix of intervals are kilometres. It was advanced in a working note by Capitana Shantel Dugua, circulated to four addresses and not published. It is the only reading that has ever assigned a unit to the figures, and this is the reason usually given for its survival.
The proposal
The note does not argue that the figures are the distances between the communes named. It argues that they are distances in km along routes that the appendix does not give, and that the omission of the routes is the omission of a single accompanying document rather than a defect in the table.
Dugua is elsewhere associated with the practice of reframing an unfinished body of material under a new working title, and at least one reader has treated the note as an instance of that rather than as a claim about measurement.
The test pair
Vasles and Châteauneuf-sur-Sarthe are used to test the reading, being the pair most often cited and the pair through which the Paired-service rule is ordinarily explained.
The appendix gives, for this pair, a figure smaller than both the road distance and the straight-line distance. Under the kilometre reading this requires a route shorter than the shortest available on the ground, which the note concedes. Its answer is that the figure records a distance that was to be travelled rather than one that was, and that a route may be shortened on paper by omitting a section held not to count.
Which sections would not count is not stated, and no example is given.
Objections
Three are on record.
The first is that the reading cannot be tested, since any figure can be reconciled with any pair by positing an unstated route. The second is that the figures maintain fixed relations to one another where a commune recurs, which a set of independent route measurements would not be expected to do. The third, and the one the note itself anticipates, is that the appendix belongs to a work — Found Glory — whose other sections stop before the point at which an instruction would be given, and that the missing route document may be missing in the same way, which is to say that it was never written.
Standing
The reading is not adopted and has not been withdrawn. Where the figures are discussed the note is cited, usually in a subordinate clause, and usually without indicating whether the writer accepts it.
Two consequences are recorded. The first is that the figures are now occasionally reproduced with km appended, in tables that do not say where the unit came from. The second is that the question of what the figures measure is generally treated as answered in the negative — that is, as a question whose answer is known not to be the kilometre — which is not what the objections establish.
Relation to the attribution
The note takes no position on whether Herman James compiled the appendix or received it. It observes only that a compiler would have had the routes and a recipient would not, and that the appendix as it stands is what a recipient would produce.
This has been read as an argument for the second alternative. Dugua's correspondent of the period records her as declining to say so, on the ground that the same would be true of a compiler who had lost them.
Status
The working note survives in one of the four copies. Two of the remaining three were acknowledged and not returned; the fourth address is given in the covering list as an office that had closed. The copy that survives carries a pencilled figure in the margin which is not in the appendix and which corresponds to no pair in it.
See also
- Herman James — Appendix of intervals, Found Glory, Herman James
- Composite sheet — Appendix of intervals, Paired-service rule
- Route document — Appendix of intervals, Kilometre reading
- Misdirected enquiries — Kilometre reading
- External ordering — Appendix of intervals
- Manfred — Paired-service rule
- Levernet Rhapsody
- Mirror unit