biometern.

1805 Edinb. Med. & Surg. Jrnl. 1 363 Let this be an ordinary drunken paroxysm, where the exhaustion is often carried to a very great length, so as nearly to approach the zero of the Brunonian biometer.

1834 G. H. Weatherhead New Synopsis Nosol. p. xxviii To measure the limits of vitality by size and vermillion, is graduating the powers of life by a biometer neither accurate nor applicable.

1859 W. Farr in Philos. Trans. (Royal Soc.) 149 838 The Life-Table is an instrument of investigation; it may be called a biometer, for it gives the exact measure of the duration of life under given circumstances.

1921 Ann. Rep. State Board Health Maryland 1917 92 This biometer is constructed on a table of survivorship, in which 10,000 persons born in a given year are traced throughout life, under the sanitary conditions of the year of computation.

1997 R. Porter Greatest Benefit to Mankind xiii. 408 Analysing mortality and salubrity, Farr used statistics to give a nudge to practical social reform through the use of life-tables as a health ‘biometer’, comparable to a barometer for the weather.

1913 S. Tashiro in Biol. Bull. 25 285 The biometer is used. This is an apparatus which has two respiratory chambers, each furnished with a cup in which a drop of barium hydrate can be introduced.

1926 Sci. Monthly Dec. 501/2 The two seeds placed in the chamber of a biometer show unmistakable differences in the quantity of carbon dioxide production.

2002 K. Roth tr. L. Frédéric Japan Encycl. 952/2 Tashiro Shirō. Chemist and biologist (1883–1963), inventor of a ‘biometer’ designed to measure the quantity of CO₂ in the human body.