assumed the name of Scrope a good many years ago, on marrying the only child of the last male of the most considerable then remaining branch of a family which had been in earlier days endowed not only with very great estates, but with two baronial coronets and an earldom. His father-in-law, the late amiable William Scrope, of Castle Combe in Wilts, and of Cotherington Hall in Lincolnshire, had been distinguished through a long life as a sportsman ;—in his latter years he won no little honour as a writer on such pursuits-which had never interfered with the zeal and diligence of the scholar and student. His volumes on Deer-stalking and Salmon-fishing will not soon be forgotten. He was also about the first amateur painter of his time, and well known as a liberal patron of Art. He naturally took a deep interest in the records of his noble lineage, and it must be lamented by many besides ourselves, that his death occurred just soon enough to prevent him from tasting the gratification which his affectionate heir had designed especially for him in the completion of this History.

ART. II.-1. Diseases of the Human Hair. From the French of M. Cazenave, Physician to the Hospital of St. Louis, Paris; with a Description of an Apparatus for Fumigating the Scalp. By T. H. Burgess, M.D. 1851.

2. Hygiène Complète des Cheveux et de la Barbe: Basée sur des récentes découvertes physiologiques et médicales, indiquant les meilleures formules pour conserver la chevelure, arrêter la chute, retarder le grisonnement, régénérer les cheveux perdus depuis long-temps, et combattre enfin toutes les affections du cuir chevelu. Par A. Debay. Paris, 1851.

SINCE

INCE the world began hair has been an universal vanity. Our young reader will doubtless confess that, as his name is tossed up from landing to landing by imposing flunkies, he passes his hands carefully through his curls to give them the last flowing touch ere he enters the ball-room-while Mr. Layard, from out the royal palace buried by the sand-storms of thousands of years, has shown us what thorough 'prigs' were the remote Assyrians in the arrangement of their locks and beards. What applies to the male sex does so with double force to the women; and we have not the slightest doubt that Alcibiades fumed at the waste of many a half-hour whilst his mistress was 'putting her hair tidy,' or arranging the golden grasshopper. Not only as a means of ornament has the hair been seized upon by all

classes

classes and generations of our kind, but it has been converted into an index, as it were, of their religious, political, and social opinions. The difference between the freeman and the slave was of old indicated by the length of the hair. In later times we all know how the Puritan rejoiced in a 'polled' head, whilst the Cavalier flaunted about in exuberant curls; so at the present moment no tub-thumper would venture to address his dearly beloved brethren' without having previously plastered his hair into pendant candle-ends. The fact of its being the only part of the body a man can shape and carve according to his fancy is sufficient to account for the constancy with which he has adopted it as his ensign of party and doctrine, and also for the multitudinous modes in which he has worn it. Leaving this part of the subject for a time, however, we will briefly consider those characteristics of hair which, taken broadly, art cannot modify nor fashion hide. Briefly, we say, and very imperfectly-for Hair in an ethnological point of view is itself a very wide subject, and its adequate treatment would require a far longer paper than we at present contemplate.

Dr. Prichard, in his laborious work on the different races of mankind, apportions to the melanic or dark-haired the greater portion of the habitable globe. Europe is the chief seat of the xantho-comic or light-haired races; indeed they seem to be almost confined to its limits, and within those limits to be cooped up in certain degrees of north latitude.

From Norway and Sweden, following their sea-kings, the hardy fair-haired races poured their piratical hordes down the great overhanging peninsula, and as if from some yard-arm thronged and dropped, boarding the great European ship, whose more immediate defenders fled in consternation before them. In this manner nearly the whole of North Germany received its prevailing population, and Britain in her turn saw her primitive black-haired Celts and Cymri driven into the mountains of Scotland and Wales. The subsequent seizures and settlements made by the Danes on our eastern coast did not in any way interfere with the flood of fair-haired people in possession, as they were of the same blond type; and the Norman invasion-in whatever proportion actually dark-would, in point of aggregate numbers, have been far too limited to affect it. The indigenous tribes, on the whole, seem to have been about as completely eaten out by the fierce fair-haired men of the North, whenever they came in contact, as were the small black rats, once common to our island and some portions of the continent, by the more powerful grey rodent of Norway.

The chief features of the ethnological map of Europe were settled

settled before the tenth century, and especially as regards the disposition of the dark and light-haired races, it remains in the mass pretty much the same as then. Nevertheless, certain intermixtures have been at work shading off the original differences. At the present moment the fairest haired inhabitants of the earth are to be found north of the parallel 48; this line cuts off England, Belgium, the whole of Northern Germany, and a great portion of Russia. Between the parallels 48 and 45 there seems to be a debateable land of dark brown hair, which includes northern France, Switzerland, and part of Piedmont, passes through Bohemia and Austria Proper, and touches the Georgian and Circassian provinces of the Czar's empire. Below this line again, Spain, Naples, and Turkey, forming the southern extremity of the map, exhibit the genuine dark-haired races. So that, in fact, taking Europe broadly from north to south, its peoples present in the colour of their hair a perfect gradation-the light flaxen of the colder latitudes deepening by imperceptible degrees into the blueblack of the Mediterranean shores. To this regular gradation, however, there are some obvious exceptions. We have already noticed the dark tribes lingering within our own island-the same is true as to the Celtic majority of the Irish; and even the Normans, as we now see them, are decidedly ranked among the black-haired. On the other hand, Venice, which is almost southern in latitude, has always been famous for the golden beauty of its hair, beloved so of Titian and his school. These isolated cases, however, only prove the rule that race mainly determines, among other ethnological peculiarities, the colour and texture of the hair. If latitude or temperature affected it materially, Taffy, Paddy, and Donald would by this time have been toned down pretty decently to the prevailing fair-haired type; if even there had been much mixture of the Celt with the Saxon, we should not see the former breed marked out by such a lump of darkness amidst the generally fair portion of the European map.

The effect of the admixture of races is evidenced very strongly, we think, by comparing the inhabitants of the great capitals with the populations of their respective countries. London, the centre of the world, is neither fair nor dark-haired, but contains within itself all shades of colour. Even so the Parisian no more represents the black-haired Norman or swart Breton than our cockney does the pure Saxon of the southern and western counties. Vienna is another example. What went on rapidly in such cities as these, has been progressing more slowly in those countries which form the highways of nations. Thus the brown hair of middle Europe is the neutral tint, which has naturally

VOL. XCII. NO. CLXXXIV.

Y

naturally resulted from the admixture of the flaxen-haired races of the north with the old southern population.

If we open a wider map we only receive ampler proof that race alone determines the colour of the hair. Thus, taking the parallel of 51 north, and following it as it runs like a necklace round the world, we find a dozen nations threaded upon it like so many parti-coloured beads. The European portion of the necklace is light-haired-whereas the Tartars, northern Mongols, and aboriginal American Indians have black straight hair—and Canada breaks the chain once more with the blond tresses of the Saxon.

That climate and food have some effect in modifying race, and with it hair as one of its most prominent signs, we do not deny; but these disturbing causes must act through a very long period of time to produce any marked effect, and certainly within the historical period we have no proof of a dark-haired people having become light, or vice versâ of flowing hair changing into woolly locks-Tom Moore's capital joke about the Irish niggers notwithstanding.

Having said that race determines the colour and quality of the hair, we have said nearly all that ethnology teaches upon the subject. An examination of its structure shows that the difference of colour is entirely owing to the tinct of the fluid which fills the hollow tube in each hair. This tinct or pigment shows through the cortical substance in the same manner that it does through the epidermis of a negro. Hair is in fact but a modification of the skin. The same might be said of feathers, horns, and scales. Not improbably the distinguished lady now honouring these pages with her attention, will be shocked at hearing that her satin-soft shoulder is almost chemically identical with the plated and roughened mail of the crocodile-and she will hardly perhaps believe us when we inform her that her bird, when he sets right some erring feather with his beak, is acting with the same chemically composed instrument upon the same chemically composed material as Mademoiselle does when she disentangles with a comb her charming mistress's softly-flowing tresses. The fond lover again, as he kisses some treasured lock, will doubtless be disgusted when we tell him, that, apart from the sentiment, he might as well impress his fervent lips upon a pig's pettitoe, or even upon the famous Knob Kerry, made out of the horn of a rhinoceros, carried by the king of hunters, Mr. Roualleyn Gordon Cumming.

The hair, anatomically considered, is composed of three parts -the follicle or tubular depression in the skin into which the hair is inserted-the bulb or root of the hair-and the stalk or

cortical

cortical part filled with pigment. A single hair, with its follicle, might be roughly likened to a hyacinth growing from a glass -with this difference that the hair is supplied with nutriment exclusively from below. The bulb, which rests upon the reticulated bed of capillary vessels of the cutis and sub-cutaneous tissue, draws its pigment cells or colouring matter directly from the blood-in like manner, the horny sheath is secreted directly from the capillaries-so that, unlike the hyacinth-plant, it grows at its root instead of at its free extremity. A hair is not, as it appears, a smooth cylindrical tube like a quill; on the contrary, it is made up of a vast number of little horny laminæ :-or our reader might realize its structure to herself by placing a number of thimbles one within the other—and as she adds to this column by supplying fresh thimbles below, she will get a good notion of the manner in which each hair grows, and will see that its oldest portion must be its free extremity.

The pigment cells have been scrutinized by Liebig, who finds a considerable difference in their constitution according to their colour. His results may be thus tabularized :

From this analysis it would appear that the beautiful golden hair owes its brightness to an excess of sulphur and oxygen with a deficiency of carbon, whilst black hair owes its jetty aspect to an excess of carbon and a deficiency of sulphur and oxygen. Vauquelin traces an oxide of iron in the latter, and also in red hair. The colouring matter, however, forms but one portion of the difference existing between the soft luxuriant tangles of the Saxon girl and the coarse blue-black locks of the North American squaw. The size and quality of each hair, and the manner in which it is planted, tell powerfully in determining the line between the two races.

Another eminent German has undergone the enormous labour of counting the number of hairs in heads of four different colours. In a blond one he found 140,400 hairs; in a brown, 109,440; in a black, 102,962; and in a red one, 88,740. What the red and black heads wanted in number of hairs, was made up, however, in the greater bulk of the hairs individually; and, in all probability, the scalps were pretty equal in weight. It is to the fineness and multiplicity of hairs that blond tresses owe the rich and silk-like character of their flow-a circumstance which artists have so loved to dwell upon. Y 2

Shakspeare