M. Mahoudeau cites from Tillaux's _Anatomie topographique,_ and MM. Perdrizet and Gaidoz in _Mélusine_ for 1893, quote from the _Secrets merveilleux de la magie naturette et cabalistique du Petit Albert_ (1743) extracts relating to this custom, which is also referred to by the Roman writers C. Valerius, Catullus, Vossius, and Scaliger. The subject is an interesting one, and merits further investigation. Ellis (42. 233) has something to say on the matter from a scientific point of view. Grimm has called attention to the very ancient custom of measuring a patient, "partly by way of cure, partly to ascertain if the malady were growing or abating." This practice is frequently mentioned in the German poems and medical books of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In one case a woman says of her husband, "I measured him till he forgot everything," and another, desirous of persuading hers that he was not of sound mind, took the measure of his length and across his head. In a Zürich Ms. of 1393, "measuring" is included among the unchristian and forbidden things of sorcery. In the region about Treves, a malady known as night-grip (_Nachtgriff_) is ascertained to be present by the following procedure: "Draw the sick man's belt about his naked body lengthwise and breadthwise, then take it off and hang it on a nail with the words 'O God, I pray thee, by the three virgins, Margarita, Maria Magdalena, and Ursula, be pleased to vouchsafe a sign upon the sick man, if he have the nightgrip or no'; then measure again, and if the belt be shorter than before, it is a sign of the said sickness." In the Liegnitz country, in 1798, we are told there was hardly a village without its _messerin_ (measuress), an old woman, whose _modus operandi_ was this: "When she is asked to say whether a person is in danger from consumption, she takes a thread and measures the patient, first from head to heel, then from tip to tip of the outspread arms; if his length be less than his breadth then he is consumptive; the less the thread will measure his arms, the farther has the disease advanced; if it reaches only to the elbow, there is no hope for him. The measuring is repeated from time to time; if the thread stretches and reaches its due length again, the danger is removed. The wise woman must never ask money for her trouble, but take what is given." In another part of Germany, "a woman is stript naked and measured with a piece of red yarn spun on a Sunday." Sembrzycki tells us that in the Elbing district, and elsewhere in that portion of Prussia, the country people are firmly possessed by the idea that a decrease in the measure of the body is the source of all sorts of maladies. With an increase of sickness the hands and feet are believed to lose more and more their just proportional relations one with another, and it is believed that one can determine how much measure is yet to be lost, how long the patient has yet to live. This belief has