"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."
The general question of the measurement of sick persons (not especially children), and of the payment of an image or a rod of precious metal of the height of a given person, or the height of his waist, shoulders, knee, etc., of the person, in recompense for some insult or injury, has been treated of by Grimm, Gaidoz, and Haberlandt. Gaidoz remarks (236. 74): "It is well known that in Catholic countries it is customary to present the saints with votive offerings in wax, which are representative of the sicknesses for which the saints are invoked; a wax limb, or a wax eye, for instance, are representative of a sore limb or of a sore eye, the cure of which is expected from the saint. Wax bodies were offered in the same way, as we learn from a ludicrous story told by Henri Estienne, a French writer of the sixteenth century. The story is about a clever monk who made credulous parents believe he had saved their child by his prayers, and he says to the father, 'Now your son is safe, thanks to God; one hour ago I should not have thought you would have kept him alive. But do you know what you are to do? You ought to have a wax effigy of his own size made for the glory of God, and put it before the image of the holy Ambrose, at whose intercession our Lord did this favour to you.'" Even poorer people were in the habit of offering wax candles of the height or of the weight of the sick person.