274 THE HUMAN SKIN. 



Passing from the geography to the hierarchy of the skin, from its 

 planetary to its social developments, we find that the skins of the 

 extreme classes of society differ as much as the classes themselves. 

 The horny hand of labor represents a prevailing texture of the sur- 

 face, which exposure to the air, coarse exercise, the sweats of toil, 

 and the quality of the bread of toil; in a word, every circumstance 

 connected with the lower classes, tends to produce and perpetuate. 

 Their complexions are those of the brawny limbs of society. The 

 present is ever a magnified time; the past and the future are com- 

 pressed; and the pores and fibres are large that work upon the pre- 

 sent, and deal with the rude exaggeration of our immediate wants. 

 The upper classes are closer knit and finer surfaced, and breeding is 

 unsuccessful, if it does not alter the skin. You do not see the details 

 of their bodies, or criticize their timbers, but they come before you 

 with a whole front at once. 



The skin also exhibits the phenomena of sex with its own cha- 

 racteristic openness, concealing and revealing according to the eldest 

 modesty of nature. Softness and strength are married in the male 

 and feminine skins, and sense and sensibility are completed in that 

 union. The woman is finer grained, to constitute a permanent aris- 

 tocracy — so much of humanity as nature can keep without coarse 

 drudging in the world. She works her feelings by fleet algebra in 

 spaces less than our knowledge, while we swelter behind, learned 

 porters, carrying cumbrous slatefuls of figures. It is because her 

 skin is deeper, more vital or as it were visceral; a sweeter trembling 

 nakedness as of a soul stripped of one earthy covering to show what 

 its mode and doings are when the hood of flesh is gone. For this 

 natural reason, and many other reasons, women are sometimes called 

 angels. This sexual difference of the skin is the sign of such a 

 difference reigning throughout the organism, for the means are car- 

 ried in the extremes; and as the soul is coordinate with the body, 



tion therefore is a distinct branch of embryology : and even at a late, or what we 

 may call the historical period of the frame, some great changes occur : the testes 

 for instance emigrate from their hot birthplace under the kidneys to the neigh- 

 borhood of the pole in the scrotum. Moreover, the opening out and stretching 

 of the infant man at birth amounts to the elongation of his feet from his head to 

 the greatest possible degree. 



