at Portici, 136 years old, then in health and able to walk daily, and who had been nurse to Charles IV. of Spain, had beautiful flaxen hair like that of a child, and told her "that it had come so after an illness."* Sir Walter Scott has beautifully summed up the various effects of care on the human frame in general :— "Danger, long travel, want, or woe, Soon change the form that best we know— And blanch at once the hair; Hard toil can roughen form or face, And want can quench the eye's bright grace, More deeply than despair." Marmion, Canto i. Stanza 27. The plumage of birds has also been known to turn gray from excessive fear. Thus, in the Edinburgh Geographical Journal, Mr. Young states that a cat having frightened a blackbird, the poor songster was found apparently lifeless in its cage, and quite wet with perspiration. Its black feathers soon fell off, and the new plumage which succeeded them was perfectly white. Sir Robert Heron has related in his journal, that at Mr. Kendall's of Barnsley, a fox pounced upon a black Poland cock, whose screams attracted the servants to his rescue, but not until he was desperately wounded and had lost half his feathers. In time, the remainder of his feathers fell off, and were replaced by an entirely white plumage. It is a curious physical fact that under intense fear or sudden alarm, the hair of the head rises up, by the action of the erectile tissue of the scalp, of course involuntary. Shakespeare has several times referred to this circumstance. QUEEN. And, as the sleeping soldiers in the alarm, Your bedded hair, like life in excrements, Starts up and stands on end. Hamlet, iii., 4. Plung'd in the foaming brine, and quit the vessel. *Eleven Years in the Family of Murat, King of Naples, 1841. Then all a fire with me: the king's son, Ferdinand, The Tempest, i., 2. HASTINGS. My hair doth stand on end to hear her curses. Richard III., i., 3. SUFFOLK. My hair be fix'd on end, as one distract. Henry VI., Part II., iii., 2. WARWICK. Staring full ghastly like a strangled man: Henry VI., Part II., iii., 2. In the graphic description of the condition of the dying Mortimer, Shakespeare beautifully calls "gray locks the pursuivants of death." (Henry VI., Part I., ii., 5.) Again he expresses the correct opinion that gray hairs ought to be reminders to the aged to deport themselves with seriousness and gravity, and to leave off giddy folly and frivolity : KING. I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers: How ill white hairs become a fool and jester ! I have long dream'd of such a kind of man, Reply not to me with a fool-born jest ; For heaven doth know, so shall the world perceive, So will I those that kept me company. When thou dost hear I am as I have been, Approach me; and thou shalt be as thou wast, The tutor and the feeder of my riots. Henry IV., Part II., v., 5. The retaining of a lock of hair as a cherished relic of a departed friend is a custom of great antiquity: ANTONY. And they would go and kiss dead Cæsar's wounds. And dip their napkins in his sacred blood; Yea, beg a hair of him for memory, And, dying, mention it within their wills, Unto their issue. Julius Caesar, iii., 2. PROSPERO. Canst thou remember A time before we came unto this cell? I do not think thou canst; for then thou wast not PROSPERO. By what? by any other house, or person? Of anything, the image tell me, that 'Tis far off; And rather like a dream than an assurance That my remembrance warrants: Had I not PROSPERO. Thou hadst, and more, Miranda: but how is it, If thou remember'st aught, ere thou cam'st here, The Tempest, i., 2. How beautiful is this filmy memory of childhood-how true to nature! "'Tis far off." To youth, the recollections of childhood are indistinct; the mind is prospective, hopeful, changeful; but in old age, in second childhood, the mind retrospects, hope fades into memory, and then, looking into "the dark backward and abysm of time," the prattle of infancy returns, early associations recur, and what in youth is a dream, becomes an assurance. The above passage involves some most important physiological truths, as the physical changes of septennial periods. It is an extraordinary fact, and well known to medical men, that a blow on the head, or cerebral disturbance, may be followed not only by the imbecility of age, but by its peculiar mental changes, particularly in the recal of early associations and events, with the loss of all those intermediate. A remarkable case in point, was that of the Welsh woman in St. Thomas's Hospital, who, after such an accident, not only recalled her native tongue, which she had not spoken for twenty years, but totally forgot every word of her accustomed English. Ben Jonson, speaking on the subject of his memory, quaintly says, "Whatsoever I *Abysm, i.e., abyss, a depth, a gulf. pawn'd with it, while I was young, and a boy, it offers me readily and without stops; but what I trust to it now, or have done of later years, it layes up more negligently, and oftentimes loses."* When the Eustachian tube is opened, by also opening the mouth we hear better than when the mouth is shut; the orifice of the tube being thereby enlarged-an observation which did not escape Shakespeare: HUBERT. I saw a smith with his hammer thus, The whilst his iron did on the anvil cool, With open mouth swallowing a tailor's news. King John, iv., 2. For perfect hearing it is necessary that a free circulation of air through the Eustachian tube, and in the tympanum, should be maintained. Deafness arising from an obstructed communication between the throat and ear is of frequent occurrence. Though Shakespeare seems to have known the fact of a connexion between the throat and ear, yet even in the present day there are many persons, both in and out of the medical profession who will hardly believe that a diseased state of the throat can affect the functions of the ear.+ Placing the ear close to the earth, the better to discern the sound of approaching footsteps, a practice often formerly resorted to by travellers and highwaymen, is thus alluded to by our poet :— PARIS. Give me thy torch, boy: hence, and stand aloof;— Yet put it out, for I would not be seen. Under yon yew trees lay thee all along, So shall no foot upon the churchyard tread (Being loose, unfirm, with digging up of graves), But thou shalt hear it; whistle then to me, As signal that thou hear'st something approach. 3. The dissimilarity between the invisible functions of that Timber: or Discoveries, 1641, p. 95. + See a Treatise on the Pathological Connections of the Throat and Ear, by James Yearsley, Surgeon. prominent feature of the human face, the organ of scent, and the visible varieties of its external structure, are both subjects worthy of remark. With some the sense of smelling is so dull, as not to distinguish hyacinths from assafoetida; they would even pass a knacker's yard without detecting the slightest particle of offensive matter; whilst others would hurry past an apothecary's shop, and be thrown into an agony of sneezing on approaching a tobacconist's. แ That facetious medical writer, Mr. Wadd, observes that, Shakespeare, who was a minute observer of the anatomical and physiological varieties of the human frame, did not allow this dissimilarity to pass unnoticed; and moreover, he starts a query that has never been satisfactorily answered, from his time to the present; namely, Canst thou tell why one's nose stands in the middle of one's face? (King Lear, i., 5.) And his nice discrimination about noses extends also to shape and colour-from the 'red-nosed innkeeper of Daventry, (Henry IV., Part I., iv., 2.) and the 'malmsey-nosed knave, Bardolph,' (Henry IV., Part II., iv., 2.) to him 'whose nose was as sharp as a pen !' (Henry V., ii., 3.) This celebrated 'malmsey-nose' possessed properties unknown to the same feature now-a-days. It was adapted to practical utility, in its application to domestic purposes, and moral instruction, by that great admirer and competent judge of its virtues, Sir John Falstaff, to whose sheets it did the office of a warming-pan (Henry V., ii., 1.); and who made as good use of it as some men do of a death's head, or a memento mori: 'I never see it,' said he, 'but I think upon hell fire.' It stands almost unrivalled in history, and ranks at least with that which gave the cognomen of Nasonis to Ovid.”* HOLOFERNES. Ovidius Naso was the man: and why, indeed, Of fancy, the jerks of invention ? Love's Labour Lost, iv., 2. George Chapman says, that while "a drie hand is a sign of • Quarterly Journal of Science, Vol. v. (1839), p. 31. |