The etymology and original significance of our common English words, _span_, _hand_, _foot_, _cubit_, _fathom_, and their cognates and equivalents in other languages, to say nothing of the self-explanatory _finger's breadth_, _arm's length_, _knee-high_, _ankle-deep_, etc., go back to the same rude anthropometry of prehistoric and primitive times, from which the classic peoples of antiquity obtained their canons of proportion and symmetry of the human body and its members. Among not a few primitive races it is the child rather than the man that is measured, and we there meet with a rude sort of anthropometric laboratory. From Ploss, who devotes a single paragraph to "Measurements of the Body," we learn that these crude measurements are of great importance in folk-medicine:-- "In Bohemia, the new-born child is usually measured by an old woman, who measures all the limbs with a ribbon, and compares them with one another; the hand, _e.g._, must be as long as the face. If the right relations do not subsist, prayers and various superstitious practices are resorted to in order to prevent the devil from injuring the child, and the evil spirits are driven out of the house by means of fumigation. In the case of sick children in Bohemia the measuring is resorted to as a sympathetic cure. In other parts of Germany, on the other hand, in Schleswig-Holstein, Thuringia, Oldenburg, it is thought that measuring and weighing the new-born child may interfere with its thriving and growth" (326. I. 302). Sibree states that in Madagascar, at circumcision, the child is measured and sprinkled with water (214. 6), and Ellis, in his history of that island, gives the following details of the ceremony (_History of Madagascar_, Vol. I. p. 182):-- "The children on whom the rite is to be performed are next led across the blood of the animal just killed, to which some idea of sacredness is attached. They are then placed on the west side of the house, and, as they stand erect, a man holding a light cane in his hand, measures the first child to the crown of the head, and at one stroke cuts off a piece of the cane measured to that height, having first carefully dipped the knife in the blood of the slaughtered sheep. The knife is again dipped in the blood, and the child measured to the waist, when the cane is cut to that height. He is afterwards measured to the knee with similar results. The same ceremony is performed on all the children successively. The meaning of this, if indeed any meaning can be attached to it, seems to be the symbolical removal of all evils to which the children might be exposed,--first from the head to the waist, then from the waist to the knees, and finally, from the knees to the sole of the foot."