 The Academy of Sciences planned to infer the flattening of the Earth from the length's differences between meridional portions corresponding to one degree of latitude.Pierre Méchain and Jean-Baptiste Delambre combined their measurements with the results of the Spanish-French geodetic mission and found a value of 1/334 for the Earth's flattening, and they then extrapolated from their measurement of the Paris meridian arc between Dunkirk and Barcelona the distance from the North Pole to the Equator which was 5 130 740 toises.As the metre had to be equal to one ten-millionth of this distance, it was defined as 0.513074 toise or 3 feet and 11.296 lines of the Toise of Peru.