SINCE the world began, hair has been a 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 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 pendent 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 darkhaired, 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 the majority of her primitive blackhaired 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 fairhaired 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 gray rodent of Norway.

The chief features of the ethnological map of Europe were 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 debatable 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 blue-black of the Mediterranean shores. To this regular gradation, however, there are

some obvious exceptions. We have already noticed the dark tribes lingering within our 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, amid 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

* According to Sir John Herschel, London is exactly the centre of the terrestrial globe.

has naturally resulted from the admixture of the flaxenhaired races of the north with the old southern population.

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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. European portion of the necklace is light-haired-whereas the Tartars, northern Mongols, and aboriginal American Indians, have black straight hair-and Upper 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 versá, of flowing hair changing into woolly locksTom 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