cosmetic care and treatment of the hands, to caution persons having it, to however slight a degree, to be especially careful to keep the nails well trimmed. The truly-formed nail has no marked curvature from front to rear. It curves only from side to side, and that curve is a flattened one. Nothing can be more repulsive than the appearance of the nails of a person who, with curvature in them from front to rear, associated, as it always is, with too sharp a curve from side to side, allows them to grow beyond the end of the finger, thus producing the effect of a veritable claw. Of course, there is no possibility of rectifying the defect of this organic growth. All that any one can do is to palliate the condition, by being careful, through paring the nails, not to let its effect be intensified.

Paronychia has been, in modern usage, divided into four varieties, of which one is what is popularly known as "runround," the other three being resolvable into what are known as different stages of whitlow.

Onychomycosis is a parasitic fungous disease. When the fungus which represents the disease preys upon the nails, they lose their translucency and become laminated and brittle. Both the nail and the nail-bed are diseased through their penetration by the fungous growth, the nail, as a whole, becoming bulkier and tending to disintegrate. Of course, it will be understood that, as a general rule, the invasion of a fungus means previouslylessened resistance through imperfect functioning of the parts.

The moral of all that has been said in this chapter is, that if we would not risk a greater fall to our vanity than ever it had rise, which, although a physical impossibility, is not a moral one, let us look out for our toes.

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE CONSTITUTION AND GROWTH OF THE HAIR.

HE reader may be surprised when told that the hair, as well as the nails, is a modification of the scarf-skin. It is nevertheless true, as the human eye, aided by the microscope, proves. Attention to the following general description of the main features of the constitution and growth of the hair will be amply repaid by knowledge valuable as a protection against the charlatanism of ignorant instruction as to the care of this important adjunct of the body.

The hair on the person is distinguished, even by the naked eye, as consisting of four different varieties. The first and most important of these is the long, smooth, and pliant hair of the head. The second is the shorter and coarser hair on the face of the adult of the male sex, and, on the adults of both sexes, under the armpit and on the pubic parts. The third is the still shorter and coarser hair of the eyebrows, eyelashes, nostrils, and orifice of the ears. The fourth is the exceedingly short and fine hair, called lanugo, which, almost imperceptibly to the naked eye, covers the general surface of the body, with the exception of the palms of the hands, the soles of the feet, the lips, and the mucous-membrane passages into the body. These varieties exhibit slight organic differences among themselves, as indicated by their constitution and growth, but not sufficient to invite attention here to an examination of their similarities and dissimilarities. It will be, for the information of the general reader, enough if we confine ourselves to the consideration of the character and growth of the hair of the head, as the highest type of similar products of the body.

It is from rude conceptions of material things that we rise

to our highest conceptions of them. Our preliminary conception is, in fact, nothing but a summoning before mental vision of one of our previous rude perceptions. These rude percep tions are, in turn, through an intellectual process, transformed into conceptions representing a higher order of perception. We are about incidentally to illustrate this truth, by remarking that the reader must first of all conceive of the place whence the hair grows as a vase,-a longish vase, with a narrow neck, and a slightly flaring funnel-like rim, the lines all flowing gently into each other without the slightest abruptness, and the rim of the vase melting, as it were, into the upper surface of the scalp of the head. That is a very rude conception, truly, to begin with, but it is absolutely necessary to begin there, if one would finally comprehend this formation, which we are about to describe. We rise to knowledge from the foot-hold of what we have seen or touched and know, not from what, being the unseen and untouched, we do not and cannot know.

Let us now, as the next step, refine upon this conception of a reminiscence of a former perception, by saying that this vase is so minute, that if one could submit a man and it to the same magnifying power, of about fifty times of apparent increase in size, the man would look about three hundred feet high. Now our vase disappears as the rude conception that it was at first, and we have left in the imagination simply a microscopic form defined by an outline of matter of some unknown kind, which remains to be described. That is the vessel, so to speak, in which an individual hair grows, just as a flower grows in a flower-pot.

Here we have again a rude conception from which to start, in the expression, "just as a flower grows in a flower-pot," from which conception we must mount, as before, to a higher plane of understanding. At the very bottom of this inclosing vessel, called a follicle, formed of an inner and outer sheath in contact

with each other, is embedded and slightly protruded through the bottom the germ called the papilla of the hair. This papilla is entirely enclosed and clasped by the bulb of the hair, a rounding, pear-shaped object, with the large end upward, and from this rises the root of the hair, and from this, in turn, at the surface of the scalp, rises the shaft of the hair, or what is called simply a hair.

Let us now, upon our present basis, refine still further upon our conception. We have now the root-sheaths of the vase-like vessel, corresponding to the flower-pot; the papilla, corresponding to the seed; the bulb, corresponding to the first bursting of the seed; the root, corresponding to the first determinate upward growth within the soil; and the hair-shaft, corresponding to the stem of a plant above the ground. But, now are to be noted important differences in the growth between such a vegetable product as that indicated and the animal product of a hair. Excepting at the point where the hair escapes from the scalp, we must not imagine the parts described to be loosely bound together. On the contrary, the papilla, the bulb, and the root of the hair are all closely invested by the inner and outer rootsheaths. So, in this organic' apparatus, we have, not as in the case of a flower-pot, an inert mass of matter, the stem of a plant growing from a seed; but a seed, bulb, root, and containing-vessel, all vitally combining for the production of a single plant-a hair.

We are now prepared to understand the minuter details of this structure. We will not go into the question of the minutest of them, for those are derived from histological research with the microscope, which discerns that the cells from the hair-bulb change in constitution and shape to fit them for positions which they occupy in the hair-shaft. This constitution, omitting the mode of its formation, we will now proceed in general terms to describe.

If we could express the first idea necessary to be seized, to