Complete.

TACITUS reports that amongst certain barbarian kings, their manner was, when they would make a firm obligation, to joyn their hands close to one another, and twist their thumbs, and when by force of straining the blood it appear’d in the ends, they lightly pricked them with some sharp instrument, and mutually suck’d them. Physicians say that the thumbs are the master fingers of the hand, and that their Latin etymology is derived from pollere. The Greeks call’d them ἀντιχεῖρ, as who should say, another hand. And it seems that the Latins also sometimes take it in this sense for the whole hand. It was at Rome a signification of favor to depress and clap in the thumbs, and of disfavor to elevate and thrust them outward.

  The Romans exempted from war all such as were maim’d in the thumbs, as having no more sufficient strength to hold their arms. Augustus confiscated the estate of a Roman knight, who had maliciously cut off the thumbs of two young children he had, to excuse them from going into the armies: and before him, the Senate, in the time of the Italick war, had condemn’d Cajus Valienus to perpetual imprisonment, and confiscated all his goods, for having purposely cut off the thumb of his left hand, to exempt himself from that expedition. Some one, I have forgot who, having won a naval battel, cut off the thumbs of all his vanquish’d enemies, to render them incapable of fighting, and of handling the oar. And in Lacedæmonia, pedagogues chastis’d their scholars by biting their thumbs.