Sz6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



blackening her teeth ! yet this fashion prevails throughout Algeria, 

 Tunis, and Tripoli. 



It has never been fully explained how we came to be prejudiced 

 against red hair, though Baron Bunsen suggests that it distinguished 

 the aborigines of Northern Europe, whose descendants have survived 

 in Jutland and Connaught, and that at a time when these F. F.'s re- 

 sisted the inroads of the Indo-Germanic tribes, and every man's hand 

 was against them, the aversion to their national characteristics, red 

 hair and a freckled skin, became an instinct of Norman and Saxon 

 nature. However that may be, the existence of the prejudice can not be 

 denied, and, in certain border districts of Sleswig where yellowish-red 

 hair has become hereditary, the local drug-stores do a rushing business 

 in lead combs, which have been found to change the objectionable tint 

 to auburn. But, when the Venetian Republic was in the zenith of its 

 power, a considerable portion of the internal revenue was derived from 

 a tax on artificial red hair, which had become a staple of commerce, 

 and was bought and substituted for their own raven locks by all the 

 fashionable ladies from Trieste to Fiorenza. 



St. Paul asserts that " if a man have long hair it is a shame unto 

 him" (1 Cor. xi, 14), and, with some phenomenal exceptions, our Cau- 

 casian contemporaries seem to share his opinion, though only a cen- 

 tury ago North America and Western Europe indulged in perukes and 

 pigtails of stately dimensions. But the Grecian aristocrats, from the 

 days of Theseus to the accession of the Macedonian madman, sought 

 to distinguish themselves by the length of their hair, as the Chinese 

 mandarins by that of their finger-nails. When Alexander marched 

 his troops against the Persian Empire, he insisted that his Grecian 

 auxiliaries must submit to a wholesale shearing, as in a hand-to-hand 

 fight their pendent tresses would give the enemy an unfair advantage ; 

 and Heinrich Heine is malicious enough to insinuate that the final 

 abolition of the Zopf, the orthodox Prussian pigtail, was prompted by 

 similar considerations. " If the old lady once had you by the Zopf," 

 he says, " all resistance ended in an unconditional surrender." 



[To be continued.] 



-*- 



THE FORMATION OF SALINE MINERAL WATERS. 



By M. DIEULAFAIT. 



AS far back as we may go in the annals of mankind, we find min- 

 eral waters occupying a considerable place in the life of the 

 peoples, and at last reach a point when they were the object of a 

 veritable worship. Notwithstanding, however, the antiquity of the 

 subject, and the importance that has always been attached to mineral 



