+2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



history to the eye, and look unaccountable enough till one has seen the 

 intermediate stages through which they came down from the more 

 serviceable wide collars, such as Milton wears in his portraits, and 

 which gave their name to the ' band-box' they used to be kept in." 

 These collars are, curiously enough, worn to this day by the choristers 

 of Jesus College, Cambridge. 



According to such ideas as these, it becomes interesting to try to 

 discover the marks of descent in our dresses, and in making this at- 

 tempt many things apparently meaningless may be shown to be full 

 of meaning. 



Women's dress retains a general similarity from age to age, togeth- 

 er with a great instability in details, and therefore does not afford so 

 much subject for remark as does men's dress. I propose, therefore, to 

 confine myself almost entirely to the latter, and to begin at the top of 

 the body, and to work downward through the principal articles of 

 clothing. 



Hats. Hats were originally made of some soft material, probably 

 of cloth or leather, and, in order to make them fit the head, a cord was 

 fastened round them, so as to form a sort of contraction. This is 

 illustrated on p. 524 of Fairholt's " Costume in England," in the 

 figure of the head of an Anglo-Saxon woman, wearing a hood bound 

 on with a head-band ; and on p. 530 are figures of several hats worn 

 during the fourteenth century, which were bound to the head by rolls 

 of cloth ; and all the early hats seem provided with some sort of band. 

 We may trace the remnants of this cord or band in the present hat- 

 band. A similar survival may be observed .in the strings of the 

 Scotch-cap, and even in the mitre of the bishop. 1 



It is probable that the hat-band would long ago have disappeared 

 had it not been made use of for the purpose of hiding the seam join- 

 ing the crown to the brim. If this explanation of the retention of the 

 hat-band is the true one, we have here a part originally of use for one 

 purpose applied to a new one, and so changing its function ; a case 

 which has an analogy to that of the development of the swimming- 

 bladders of fishes, used to give them lightness in the water, into the 

 lungs of mammals and birds, used as the furnace for supporting ani- 

 mal heat. 



The duties of the hat-band have been taken in modern hats by two 

 running strings fastened to the lining, and these again have in their 

 turn become obsolete, for they are now generally represented by a 

 small piece of string, by means of which it is no longer possible to 

 make the hat fit the head more closely. 



The ancestor from which our present chimney-pot hat takes most 



of its characteristics is the broad-brimmed, low-crowned hat, with an 



immense plume falling down on to the shoulder, which was worn during 



the reign of Charles II. 1 At the end of the seventeenth, and during 



1 For the origin of this curious head-dress, see Fairholt, p. 564. 2 Ibid., p. 540. 



