a market-town of the county of Essex, in the hundred of Hinchford, forty-six miles from London. The river Colne runs at the bottom of the town, from which the streets gently rise. It has a good corn-market on Friday, and once employed many persons in the woollen manufacture, which is now nearly extinct. There is a good foundation grammar-school, and the county bridewell is established in the town. The population amounted in 1801 to 3380, in 1811 to 3379, in 1821 to 3858, and in 1831 to 4637.

HALTERISTÆ, in Antiquity, a kind of players at discus, who were so denominated from a peculiar kind of discus, called by the Greeks ἀλτήριον, and by the Latins halter. (See Discus.) Some conceive the discus to have been a leaden weight or ball which the vaulters bore in their hands, to secure and keep themselves the more steady in their leaping. Others think that the halter was a lump or mass of lead or stone, with a hole or handle fixed to it, by which it might be carried; and that the halterists were those who exercised themselves in removing these masses from place to place. Mercurialis, in his treatise De Arte Gymnastica (i. ii. c. 12), distinguishes two kinds of halteristæ (for though there was but one halter, there were two ways of applying it); the one was to throw or pitch it in a certain manner; the other only