The Book of Curiosities

by John Platts

The wonders of creating power are seen in every thing, even in the hair that adorns our surface.

All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.
That, chang’d thro’ all, and yet in all the same;
Great in the earth, as in th’ ethereal frame;
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze,
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees,
Lives thro’ all life, extends thro’ all extent,
Spreads undivided, operates unspent;
Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part,
As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart;
As full, as perfect, in vile Man that mourns,
As the rapt seraph that adores and burns:
To him no high, no low, no great, no small;
He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all.
Pope.

We shall now introduce to our readers some Ancient and Modern Opinions respecting the Hair.

The ancients held the hair a sort of excrement, fed only with excrementitious matters, and no proper part of a living body. They supposed it generated of the fuliginous parts of the blood, exhaled by the heat of the body to the surface, and then condensed in passing through the pores. Their chief reasons were, that the hair being cut, will grow again, even in extreme old age, and when life is very low; that in hectic and consumptive people, where the rest of the body is continually emaciating, the hair thrives; nay, that it will even grow again in dead carcases. They added, that hair does not feed and grow like the other parts, by introsusception, i. e. by a juice circulating within it, but, like the nails, by juxtaposition. But the moderns are agreed, that every hair properly and truly lives, and receives nutriment to fill it, like the other parts; which they prove hence, that the roots do not turn grey in aged persons sooner than the extremities, but the whole changes colour at once; which shews that there is a direct communication, and that all the parts are affected alike. In strict propriety, however, it must be allowed, that the life and growth of hairs is of a different kind from that of the rest of the body, and is not immediately derived therefrom, or reciprocated therewith. It is rather of the nature of vegetation. They grow as plants do, or as some plants shoot from the parts of others; from which, though they draw their nourishment, yet each has, as it were, its distinct life and economy. They derive their food from some juices in the body, but not from the nutritious juices of the body; whence they may live, though the body be starved. Wulferus, in the Philosophical Collections, gives an account of a woman buried at Nurenberg, whose grave being opened forty-three years after her death, hair was found issuing forth plentifully through the clefts of the coffin. The cover being removed, the whole corpse appeared in its perfect shape; but, from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot, covered over with thick-set hair, long and curled. The sexton going to handle the upper part of the head with his fingers, the whole fell at once, leaving nothing in his hand but a handful of hair: there was neither skull nor any other bone left: yet the hair was solid and strong. Mr. Arnold, in the same collection, gives a relation of a man hanged for theft, who, in a little time, while he yet hung upon the gallows, had his body strangely covered over with hair.

Before we dismiss this subject, we shall give the following curious Instances of the Internal Growth of Hair.

Though the external surface of the body is the natural place for hairs, we have many well-attested instances of their being found also on the internal surface. Amatus Lusitanus mentions a person who had hair upon his tongue. Pliny and Valerius Maximus say, that the heart of Aristomenes the Messenian, was hairy. Cællus Rhodiginus relates the same of Hermogenes the rhetorician; and Plutarch, of Leonidas king of Sparta. Hairs are said to have been found in the breasts of women, and to have occasioned the distemper called trichiasis; but some authors are of opinion, that these are small worms, and not hairs. There have been, however, various and indisputable evidences of hairs found in the kidneys, and voided by natural discharge. Hippocrates says, that the glandular parts are the most subject to hair; but bundles of hair have been found in the muscular parts of beef, and in parts of the human body equally firm. Hair has been often found in abscesses and imposthumations. Schultetus, opening the abdomen of a human body, found twelve pints of water, and a large lock of hair swimming loosely in it. It has, however, been found on examination, that some of the internal parts of the body are more subject to an unnatural growth of hair than others. This has long been known to anatomists; and many memorable instances have been recorded by Dr. Tyson, and others. In some animals, hairs of a considerable length have been discovered growing in the internal parts; and on several occasions, they have been found lying loosely in the cavities of the veins. There are instances of mankind being affected in the same manner. Cardan relates, that he found hair in the blood of a Spaniard; Slonatius, in that of a gentlewoman of Cracovia; and Schultetus declares, from his own observation, that those people, who are afflicted with the plica polonica, have very often hair in their blood.

We shall, in the next place, call the reader’s attention to some Curious Remarks concerning the Beard.

A beard gives to the countenance a rough and fierce air, suited to the manners of a rough and fierce people. The same face without a beard appears milder; for which reason, a beard becomes unfashionable in a polished nation. Demosthenes, the orator, lived in the same period with Alexander the Great, at which time the Greeks began to leave off beards. A bust, however, of that orator, found in Herculaneum, has a beard, which must either have been done for him when he was young, or from reluctance in an old man to a new fashion. Barbers were brought to Rome from Sicily, the 454th year after the building of Rome. And it must relate to a time after that period, what Aulus Gellius says, that people accused of any crime were prohibited to shave their beards till they were absolved. From Hadrian downward, the Roman emperors wore beards. Julius Capitolinus reproaches the Emperor Verus for cutting his beard at the instigation of a concubine. All the Roman generals wore beards in Justinian’s time. The pope shaved his beard, which was held a manifest apostasy by the Greek church, because Moses, Jesus Christ, and even God the Father, were always drawn with beards by the Greek and Latin painters. Upon the dawn of smooth manners in France, the beaus cut the beards into shapes, and curled the whiskers. That fashion produced a whimsical effect: men of gravity left off beards altogether. A beard, in its natural shape, was too fierce even for them; and they could not, for shame, copy after the beaus. This accounts for a regulation, anno 1534, of the University of Paris, forbidding the professors to wear a beard.

Now follows, A curious account of Women with Beards.

Of women remarkably bearded we have several instances. In the cabinet of curiosities at Stutgard, in Germany, there is the portrait of a young woman, called Bartel Graetje, whose chin is covered with a very large beard. She was drawn in 1787, at which time she was but twenty-five years of age. There is likewise, in another cabinet, the same portrait of her when she was more advanced in life, but likewise with a beard. It is said, that the Duke of Saxony had the portrait of a poor Swiss woman taken, remarkable for her long bushy beard; and those who were at the carnival of Venice in 1726, saw a female dancer astonish the spectators, not more by her talents, than by her chin covered with a black bushy beard. Charles XII. had in his army a female grenadier, who wanted neither courage nor a beard to be a man. She was taken at the battle of Pultowa, and carried to Petersburg, where she was presented to the czar, in 1724: her beard measured a yard and a half. We read in the Trevoux Dictionary, that there was a woman seen at Paris, who had not only a bushy beard on her face, but her body likewise covered all over with hair. Among a number of other examples of this nature, that of the great Margaret, the governess of the Netherlands, is very remarkable. She had a very long stiff beard, which she prided herself on: and being persuaded that it contributed to give her an air of majesty, she took care not to lose a hair of it. It is said, that the Lombard women, when they were at war, made themselves beards with the hair of their heads, which they ingeniously arranged on their cheeks, that the enemy, deceived by the likeness, might take them for men. It is asserted, after Suidas, that in a similar case the Athenian women did as much. These women were more men than our Jemmy-Tessamy countrymen. About a century ago, the French ladies adopted a mode of dressing their hair in such a manner, that curls hung down their cheeks as far as their bosom. These curls went by the name of whiskers. This custom, undoubtedly, was not invented after the example of the Lombard women, to fight men.