The hair : its growth, care, diseases, and treatment / by C. Henri Leonard.

  • Leonard, C. Henri (Charles Henri), 1850-1925.
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The hair : its growth, care, diseases, and treatment / by C. Henri Leonard. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    hairs from our friend who trod the streets of Thebes three thousand years ago. In animals this medullary portion is very much more marked, and in fact is quite chai-acteristic. The rabbit, rat, skunk and mink have each a cellular arrangement of the medulla, of the hair-shaft, peculiar to themselves; and it is quite easy, with the aid of the microscope, to distinguish one from the other. In the fallow deer, 1, Fig. 11, the whole shaft of the hair, excepting the thin outer layer or cortex, is entirely cellular. 2 represents the larger hair from a rat, while 3 shows the cellular arrangement seen in the hair from a white rabbit. Very simi- lar in arrangement of its cells as here seen, 3, Fig. 11, is the hair of the ordinary squirrel; the main difference is that in the sauirrel these cells are opaque. ■ So constant is the characteristic difference in the medullary cellular arrangement seen in hairs from different animals, that it is quite easy, in most instances, to name the species from which it was taken. The frauds of fur dealers may, by the means of the microscope, be thus detected, as these cellular markings are tell-tales that they cannot by any manner of means disguise, without destroying the texture of the hair itself. This portion of the hair is the more recently formed portion of the hair-cylinder; and between the cells themselves/there is considerable residual air, thus tending to give a white color to the shaft. In gray hairs it becomes more marked, as a natural pi-ocess of physical degeneration; the cells themselves having become filled with air, and the fluid, natural to them in youth, becoming more or less absorbed.