218 STUDIES IN LIFE AND SENSE. 



Take firstly the case of the effects of wrinkled care. If " care will 

 kill a cat," as George Wither has it, despite the innumerable lives with 

 which the feline nature is usually credited, it is also certain that the 

 " ravell'd sleave of care " unquestionably affects the bodily processes 

 more plainly and lastingly than any of the other emotions. What 

 text has more frequently been made the subject of poetic comment 

 than the lean body and worn visage encompassing the harassed soul? 

 John Hunter has noted that even in the hen, the care attending the 

 upbringing of her numerous progeny keeps her body lean and 

 meagre. " A hen shall hatch her chickens," says the observant 

 founder of modern physiology, " at which time she is very lean ; if 

 these chickens are taken from her she will soon get fat, but if they 

 are allowed to stay with her, she will continue lean the whole time 

 she is rearing them, although she is as well fed and eats as much as 

 she would have done if she had had no chickens." Substitute the 

 worries of business or the cares and exigencies of life for the chickens, 

 and place mankind in the place of the bird, and the picture of the 

 physiologist would read equally true. 



The influences of fear or care upon the skin and hair are equally 

 notable. The " Prisoner of Chillon's " is no fanciful case, but one 

 which medicine may show is of tolerably common occurrence. Bichat, 

 the physiologist, notes such a case. After a severe illness, often after 

 mental worry or temporary insanity, the hair may change its hue in a 

 gradual fashion towards the whiteness of age. And that " sudden 

 fears " may 



Time outgo, 

 And blanch at once the hair, 



is also a plain experience of the physician. In times of peril, such as on 

 the threat and expectation of an invasion, numerous cases of a sudden 

 change of the colour of hair have been recorded. The late Professor 

 Laycock mentions a singular case, in which a lady, after a severe 

 attack of neuralgia occurring in the night, found in the morning that 

 the inner portion of one eyebrow, and the eyelashes attached to the 

 part in question, had become of a white colour. There seems every 

 reason to believe in the correctness of Dr. Laycock's assertion, that 

 the natural greyness of old age is connected with certain changes in 

 nerve-centres and in the nerves which are connected with the hair- 

 bulbs, and presumably, therefore, with the conditions regulating the 

 nutrition of the hairs. If this view be correct, it certainly shows how 

 extensive and widespread are the influences which emanate from the 

 brain and nerve-centres as the head-quarters of mind. On the converse 

 side of things, we must not fail to note that occasionally, in a perfectly 

 natural fashion, and without any undue mental stimulus, the hair of the 

 aged may exhibit all the luxuriance and characteristics of youth. An 

 old gentleman, aged 75, says Dr. Tuke, whose bones even "were so 



