Weighing of infants is looked upon with favour in some portions of western Europe, and to the same source we may ultimately trace the modern baby's card with the weight of the newcomer properly inscribed upon it,--a fashion which bids fair to be a valuable anthropometric adjunct. "Hefting the baby" has now taken on a more scientific aspect than it had of yore.
The following curious custom of the eastern Eskimo is perhaps to be mentioned here, a practice connected with their treatment of the sick. "A stone weighing three or four pounds, according to the gravity of the sickness, is placed by a matron under the pillow. Every morning she weighs it, pronouncing meanwhile words of mystery. Thus she informs herself of the state of the patient and his chances of recovery. If the stone grows constantly heavier, it is because the sick man cannot escape, and his days are numbered" (523. 39).
It is a far cry from Greenland to England, but there are connecting links in respect of folk-practice. Mr. Dyer informs us that in the parish church of Wingrove, near Ailesbury, as late as 1759, a certain Mrs. Hammokes was accused of witchcraft, and her husband demanded the "trial by the church Bible." So "she was solemnly conducted to the parish church, where she was stript of all her clothes to her shift, and weighed against the great parish Bible in the presence of all her neighbours. The result was that, to the no small mortification of her accuser, she outweighed the Bible, and was triumphantly acquitted of the charge" (436. 307, 308).
How often has not woman, looked upon in the light of a child, been subjected to the same practices and ceremonies!
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:--