280 THE IIUMAN SKIN. 



spheres. Surfaces, bonds and communications belong to nature and 

 spirit alike. Manners are a social skin, whereby our savageness is 

 hidden and compressed, our wants are tamed into shapely occasions, 

 and the rules that glide from man to man fold and wrap individuals 

 into communities, and keep the warts of our eccentricity leveled 

 down under the common tone of the time. Laws and bonds are 

 more penetrating manners, as it were the membranous politesse that 

 is binding upon the inward life. And the arts that beautify our 

 estate, live and reside upon the new extensions of human nature 

 formed by these amiable skins. 



The universe also has the cutaneous principle throughout, as the 

 ground of its beauty, and the substantial theatre of its changes. 

 Landscape and ocean-scene are the planetary skin, and field, garden 

 and grove are the expressive face that the world upturns in grati- 

 tude to its cultivators.* Atmosphere, tides and magnetic lines, 

 varied soils and successive climates, depth and deeper depth of 

 strata, enamelled vastness of plant and flower, mutations of all as 

 constant as heaven is constant — these are the natural family of those 

 minutiae of the human frame with which we have busied ourselves 

 here. And go where we will, we cannot transcend one pen-stroke 

 of the everlasting order. The skin is a truth, and omnipresent. 



* It would not be difficult to run the parallel between the human and planet- 

 ary skins. The body with its hard muscular surface is the naked planet, to be 

 clothed with a skin that will receive the sun by inviting but independent forms. 

 The soil, itself chiefly of organic origin, is the fatty layer which first covers in the 

 bare rocks and surfaces, and makes them mildly round. The network of bind- 

 ing grass, the interlacing kingdom of plants and trees, represents the cutis with 

 its fibrous coverings. The animal kingdom, and man especially, is the papillary 

 layer, quick, sentient and locomotive, living on the best and most fertile parts of 

 the great surface. The vegetable kingdom, as it proceeds from human cultiva- 

 tion and through the mind of man, is the rete mucosum, a world of new growth 

 rising to the surface, and covering in the rest. The universal mechanism of the 

 arts, polishing everything externally, educating man, domesticating animals, 

 pruning and raising the culture of plants, and conciliating mineral or mechanical 

 truth with vital rotundity and flexibility, is the varnish of the cuticle, through 

 which man and the world are put in their court dress of beauty, suitable to hold 

 the train of light which falls from the progressive sun. Thus the skin is a circu- 

 lar vesture, coming up like a scarf from the earth to wrap the shoulders of man, 

 and falling down again from him in statelier folds towards the same earth. Its 

 ascending sweep is from the fat to the central or capital cutis ; its descending, 

 from the cutis to the cuticle. 



