ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 75 



representing two rafters of a house united at the top, was originally 

 bestowed on the founder of a house or family thereafter entitled to 

 bear arms, and in that use was a perfect symbol. When the mod- 

 ern army uniform was planned the facility of forming an obtuse 

 angle by two strips of cloth led to the selection, from among all 

 the heraldic blazonry, of the chevron to mark the sleeves of non- 

 commissioned officers ; so that, while retaining both its name and 

 form, its purport wholly disappeared. 



The initial character of medical prescriptions met a fate still 

 more humiliating ; once portraying the extended wings of Jove's 

 eagle and used as a prayer to the king of gods for his aid to the 

 action of the remedy, its very shape was corrupted until, resembling 

 the letter R with a flourish, [R] it is vulgarly called an abbreviation 

 of the word "Recipe." So, though once a sublime symbol, it has 

 ceased to be even a respectable sign. 



The barber's pole, in the middle of its history, was, perhaps, a 

 symbol, having started as an honest, though prosaic sign, and ends, 

 in this country at least, as one neither appropriate nor sensible. 

 The bloody band used by barber chirurgeons in their phlebotomy, 

 wrapped, for convenience, spirally around a supporting rod, was, in 

 the last century, still found in some Old World nooks, and when that 

 utensil was exhibited in front of the sho,p it signified "bleeding 

 done here," just as the old boot the cobbler hangs over his door is 

 the advertisement of his humble calling. When the red band was 

 painted on the contrasting white ground of a pole, and the tonsor 

 only drew blood by accident instead of by profession, the device 

 might claim some symbolic dignity, but the blue stripe was lately 

 added in the United States ; so that, in the combination of colors 

 now shown, a fanciful physiologist may detect the distinction be- 

 tween venous and arterial blood, and the more poetic and religious 

 mind may be exalted to suggestions embracing the ark of the cove- 

 nant. Now, the change, under my personal observation, has oc- 

 curred from the enterprise of some patriotic barbers who added 

 blue to the red and white so as to include all the national colors, 



