Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/273

 fowls, or the change of coat in deer, cats, and other hairy animals. The hairs reach their maturity, die, fall out, and are replaced by others, but to a less extent in man than in those animals.

Children who are born with hair lose it all in a few months, though the change is hardly noticed, as the new hair is substituted so gradually. During a fever or a sea voyage, it is not unusual for the hair to fall out, but it is very rare for the baldness to remain, if proper precautions are observed. So long as the hair-bulbs are healthy, the hair can be made to grow; when they are destroyed or absorbed, then the baldness is irremediable, and it is useless and foolish to attempt any course of treatment to restore it. If the skin has a white, shiny, polished appearance, if it does not easily become red when rubbed, if on examining it with a microscope, a number of small hairs are not visible, and the ducts of the hair-bulbs are closed, then the patient had better spend no more money on "hair restorers," "philocomes," or "trichogenes," but save it for his perruquier.

The color of the hair we have explained to be dependent on the coloring matter in the cells of the inner coat. It varies in health from a light flaxen to a jet black, and can to some extent be altered by the materials taken as food, and also by applications made directly to the external surface of the scalp.