"GLOSSY SKIN" 167 



unusually intense degree the working of those nutritional 

 influences and processes which are daily at work from the 

 cradle to the grave "writing down" the impressions of 

 time on the human physique so plainly that "he who runs 

 may read" for are not the dappled skin of the chubby 

 infant, the ruddiness of youth, the finished growth and 

 nutritional completeness of adolescence, the nascent de- 

 clinature and wrinkling of active workaday life, and the 

 wholesale shrinkage of old age, but impressions left by 

 fleeting time to mark the stages of the journey of life ? 



The cutaneous features and characteristics of these 

 various stages of life are, to a great extent, produced by 

 the varying peripheral disposal of the sensory or afferent 

 neuronal plasma, consisting of the medullary and axis 

 cylinder substances, and the surrounding neurilemmar 

 lymph by the nervine circulatory media and forces, regu- 

 lated by the altering conditions of vitality as determined 

 by age and environment. Moreover, and as a matter of 

 course, the appendages of the skin, comprising hair, nails, 

 etc., have their tell-tale feature impressed upon them by 

 time and determined by the operation of the same genetic, 

 formative, and nutritional laws on the same, but variedly 

 disposed, materials, together with the addition of altered 

 pigmentation in the manifold stages and degrees of com- 

 plexity between the "positive and negative." 



The atrophic changes displayed in "glossy skin," in 

 origin and character, are identical with the atrophic changes 

 displayed in myopathic muscle, at any rate in the first 

 stage, while in the second, or final, stage the respective 

 atrophic changes are determined on the same lines, but 

 modified by the somewhat different structural conditions 

 existing between skin and muscle tissues. In like manner 

 the atrophic cause must be sought for in faulty haemo- 

 neuroglial supplies, in breakdown of the neuronal struc- 

 tural developments of cell, nerve fibre, and terminal 

 extensions, one or all of which may be found faulty in 

 individual instances of the ailment, but one of which must 

 have been primarily responsible for the induction of the 

 pathological state and its consequences. 



"Glossy skin" thus represents faulty dermal nutrition, 

 due to nervine breakdown in one or other of the structural 



