lectual, like her friend, Madame de Staël, was of the finest mold, wise, courageous, patient, sympathetic, pitiful, and faithful beyond compare; who, even upon the verge of old age, when she died, retained her influence over all ages and conditions of men and women, after her youth, beauty, and fortune had passed

away.

It will have been noticed that, in the description just given of Madame Récamier, it is said that the brilliancy of her complexion threw everything else into the shade. The supreme beauty of such a complexion, it should be understood from all that has now been said, is not derived from mere pink and white, or red and white effects. It is born of nothing less than blood mantling, with a certain subtlety of distribution, in a skin of superlative fineness and translucency. All may be accorded to a skin in fineness of texture and in color, but without a certain adjustment of vascular supply and great translucency it cannot produce the highest effect as complexion. It is almost needless to repeat that general healthiness of body and skin is indispensable to the beauty of the skin, which in the face we speak of as the complexion. It remains, then, only to consider the remaining source of the vivid effects with which we are acquainted, as exhibited in the complexion. This subject is the more inviting, because the source of subtle effects of the complexion seems to have escaped the attention of all writers on the skin with whom we are acquainted. We venture to say that the unpremeditated popular answer to the question as to what produces them would be that they are derived from the character of the skin, as shown by reflected light. And that reply would contain a certain measure of truth, although the conception back of it would be wide of the mark as to the cause. The peculiarities which we see in the complexion are not made by reflected light. They already exist, to render it possible for them to be conveyed to us by reflected light. Reflection of light

from them is merely the condition under which their previous existence is brought to our knowledge. We should, in fact, understand that just as incident light contributes to constituting those peculiarities, reflected light is merely the agency by which we perceive them. In a word, flesh and blood and incident light are the two agencies that are concerned in their production. There is, then, a something else besides flesh and blood which is contributory to those effects, since they cannot be created by their reflection to us, which only enables us to see what already exists. That something else is the refraction and reflection of incident light pervading the tissues of the skin.

The blood is red; the veins, as seen through the skin, look blue. Their blueness cannot be derived from the color of their coating, for that is a dingy white, with a trace of red. It has never occurred to thousands of persons to investigate the cause of this apparent anomaly, or, indeed, to thousands, that there is in this fact any anomaly. Yet the blood in leaving the left side of the heart, after it has been oxygenated by the lungs, is crimson, and after making the tour of the body is, when about to enter the right side of the heart, the color of claret. Nowhere does it appear through the skin as even tinged with crimson or claret color, but everywhere as blue. Always remaining of some reddish hue, it is, therefore, only apparently blue. It is clearly, then, a phenomenon of light with which we are called upon to deal in investigating the peculiar effects observable in the complexion. The general reader is not alone in having remained. unobservant of this main fact, and even of the matter of detail just mentioned, for many physicians are equally in the dark on the subject, as we have ascertained by careful inquiry.

The reader is now, after having read the, preceding chapter on the constitution of the skin, in a position to understand, with the addition of a few more facts, the cause of the phenomenon of great beauty in the complexion.

Light, as we see it proceeding from the sun or electricity, which latter is the purer form of it, consists of an infinite number of colored rays blended in one kind of ray, which is called white. Hence, we call the light of the sun white light. The phenomena which we are about to examine can, it is true, be partially observed even by a single imperfectly homogeneous light. We witnessed one of them by accident only the other evening, as shown in the pearly inside coat of an oyster-shell illuminated by gas-light reflected from a bright-red shade. Nevertheless, the assumption of white light is the most proper one in the discussion of the present question.

Light tends to proceed in a straight path, but, as is well known, it is susceptible of being diverted from that course, when it is incidentally found to be broken up into rays of different color, called primary, secondary, tertiary, and so on, to a point where they evidently continue beyond the range of our vision, whether aided or unaided by the most delicate instru ments. All light proceeds with the same velocity in the same medium. But, on the other hand, each differently-colored ray has its own specific wave-length, the mean wave-length of dif ferently-colored rays visible being one fifty-thousandth of an inch.

There are various ways in which matter interferes with the tendency of light to pursue a straight course, through reflection, refraction, diffraction, and polarization. It is, however, only with refraction, diffraction, and reflection that we have to do here. When light is refracted, it is by passing from one medium to another. This alters its course so as to produce in rays relative retardation and acceleration, the velocity of all depending upon whether it passes into a more or less dense medium than the one which it has left. Refracted light is

changed not only as to its course, but as to the time of its passage. When light is diffracted it also is diverted from its course, and its rays relatively retarded or accelerated, but it is

not, as a whole, modified in velocity in passing, the phenomenon of diffraction taking place in the atmosphere, and not by light passing from one medium to another of grosser matter. Diffraction takes place through light, in its straight course, striking the sharp edge of an object in its path, which action causes it to be broken up into colored rays. The visual consequences of this behavior of light are of infinite complexity. Two rays of equal intensity, coinciding by a difference of only half a wave-length, extinguish each other and produce darkness. Rays, by superposition, reinforce each other in the production and modification of color. The whole of the phenomena involved result from the interferences of rays of light of different wave-lengths. Origi nally of the same wave-length in white light, light becomes, when broken up into colored rays, of an infinite number of wavelengths, and produces infinite complexity of color-effects.

It is with the interference of rays of different wave-lengths, not to the point of obliterating each other, but to that of infinitely modifying the color with which they are inseparably associated, that we are concerned.

It has been shown that the skin consists of six layers of different character. Throughout them the cells themselves are different in form in the different layers. Moreover, the coats of the veins have three layers, as have, with some modifications, the venules; and these layers are of different cellular formation and ultimate general structure. It has been shown that the skin is translucent to a degree enabling us to see light through two thicknesses of it, in addition to a thin cartilage. It follows that, when light, especially white light, falls on any part of the skin, it cannot proceed without being subjected to myriads of refractions through the various media in the skin. What takes place when it impinges upon the face, which represents the skin in its highest delicacy, is analogous to what occurs when white light penetrates thin sheets of isinglass in contact with each other, or the thin layers

of an opal. It is easy enough to say that the effects are caused by refraction, but really to understand the cause of them is to know, besides recognizing that the fundamental cause is refraction, that the consequences in color are due to the refracted interferences of the rays of light. Analogous effects to those produced by light in isinglass, the opal, and other substances, and in instruments specially devised for exhibiting them, are produced by the same cause in the depths of the translucent skin by its different layers: in sum, by refraction and interferences of rays, the resultant effect, through reflection to the observing eye, being that which we know as individual complexion, determined, as to final effect, by individual constitution of the skin of the face. Further consideration will render the points involved still clearer.

Not only are thin plates penetrated by white light capable of breaking the light up into innumerable colored rays, but striated and corrugated surfaces have the same capacity under certain conditions. A fine skin has, to the naked eye, an appearance of perfect smoothness, but by optical tests to which it can be subjected it is seen to be far from smooth. It is not so smooth as represented in diagrams of magnified portions of it showing the cells of the scarf-skin. The eye, viewing the representation from above, receives no correct impression as to the vertical eccentricities of the surface, and, of course, it receives no impres sion at all as to the color of the skin or the reflection of light from it as exhibited by the skin itself. Neither does the description "horny layer of the skin" convey any just idea of the appearance of its surface when highly magnified, because the horny quality is so exquisitely fine as to violate preconceptions as to applicability of the term.

It will be best, therefore, to describe here the appearance of a fine skin as it looks under the microscope, magnified, say, fifty times. It will then become evident to the reader that some of