Hand (unit) inches for the handsbreadth; Mortimer gives the same, three inches for the Hand's-breadth, and four for the "Handful, or simply, Hand", but adds "The hand among horse-dealers, &c. is four-fingers' breadth, being the fist clenched, whereby the height of a horse is measured", thus equating "hand" with both the palm and the fist. Similarly, Wright's 1831 translation of Buffon mentions "A hand breadth (palmus), the breadth of the four fingers of the hand, or three inches", but the "Encyclopædia Perthensis" of 1816 gives under Palm (4): "A hand, or measure of lengths comprising three inches". Today the hand is used
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? dancing on a needle's point occurs in an expository work by the English divine, William Sclater (1575-1626). In "An exposition with notes vpon the first Epistle to the Thessalonians" (1619), Sclater claimed that scholastic philosophers occupied themselves with such pointless questions as whether angels "did occupie a place; and so, whether many might be in one place at one time; and how many might sit on a Needles point; and six hundred such like needlesse points." Harrison proposes that the reason an English writer first introduced the "needle’s point" into a critique of medieval angelology is that it makes for