January 7, 1887.] 



SCIEN~CE'. 



17 



It is well known that at seven months the 

 human foetus is entirely covered with hair. 

 These hairs traverse the skin obliquely, and con- 

 tinue to increase slowly until they attain from a 

 quarter to half an inch in length, when they are 

 replaced by the small persistent hairs. The infant 

 comes into the world covered with embi'yonal 

 hair. The doj^-men are covered with a woolly or 

 silky hair, presenting embryonal characters. 

 Both Ecker and his reviewer, Dr. Vars, agree that 

 general hypertrichosis is simj)ly an arrest of de- 

 velopment ; that is to say, the down, instead of 

 being replaced by hair, persists and continues to 

 develop. 



I had not heard of the transfer of the Birman 

 family to England until I read the newspaper re- 

 IJort recently. There is no reason to discredit the 

 account, proper allowance being made for enthu- 

 siastic hyperbole. O. T. Mason. 



CONTAGIOUS DISEASES. 



In a paper recently read before the Philadel- 

 phia county medical society. Dr. Arthur V. Meigs 

 takes the ground that scarlet-fever is very much 

 less contagious than is commonly supposed ; much 

 less, in fact, than measles and whooping-cough ; 

 and in proof of his opinion, he cites the fact, that, 

 while it is the rule for measles and whooping- 

 cough to affect all the children in a household, 

 scarlet-fever usually limits its attack to one or 

 two, even though there may be others who have 

 never had the disease, and are therefore presuma- 

 bly susceptible. There is one point which the au- 

 thor of the paper does not, it seems to us, lay suf- 

 ficient stress upon ; and that is, that, while parents 

 dread scarlet-fever, they have but little fear of 

 measles or whooping-cough, and, being influenced 

 by that popular impression that all children must 

 at some time of their lives have these latter dis- 

 eases, they take no pains to isolate the sick from 

 the well, as they do if the disease be scarlet-fever. 

 The writer could give repeated instances where 

 the most rigid isolation vpas practised in cases of 

 measles, in which but one member of a family 

 was attacked, though there were a number of 

 others who were presumably suscei)tible. Until, 

 therefore, the same scrupulous care is taken to 

 separate the affected child from the unaffected in 

 measles as is done in scarlet-fever, we shall hesi- 

 tate to accept the conclusion that scarlet-fever is 

 much less contagious than measles. This will 

 probably never be done until parents are taught 

 that measles is not a trivial disease, but is, in fact, 

 many times a most serious one. In England the 

 number of deaths in five years from measles was 

 43,139 ; in Brooklyn in ten years 1,012 children 



died from this cause ; and in New York during 

 the week ending Dec. 4, 42 deaths from it are re- 

 corded. This takes no account of the countless 

 number that are left with impaired constitutions 

 and lung diseases, and who, within a very short 

 time after this attack of measles, appear in the 

 mortality statistics as victims to bronchitis or 

 pneumonia. And the same may be said of whoop- 

 ing-cough, — a disease which, in the period 1875- 

 79, caused in England alone 66,730 deaths. 



SYNECHDOCHICAL MAGIC. 



All students of anthropology are familiar with 

 the belief among lower peoples that what is done 

 to a part of a person or to his property is done to 

 him. These people all dread to have the smallest 

 part of their bodies or their intimate possessions 

 go from them. It has always seemed to me to 

 need further explanation, a more simple and com- 

 monplace solution. 



This is given in Mr. A. W. Howitt's paper in 

 the August number of the Journal of the An- 

 thropological institute. I quote his language : — - 



" Connected with the throvving of magical sub- 

 stances in an invisible form is the belief that they 

 can be caused to enter the body of a victim by 

 burying them in his footsteps, or even in the 

 mark made in the ground by his reclining body. 

 Sharp fragments of quartz, glass, bone, charcoal, 

 are thus used, and rheumatic affections are fre- 

 quently attributed to them. 



"Another form of this belief is seen in the 

 practice of putting the jagged cone of the Casua- 

 rina quadrivalvis into a man's fire, so that the 

 smoke may blow into his eyes and cause him to 

 become blind. The idea seems to be that the 

 eidolon of the cone will produce acute ophthal- 

 mia. 



"A piece of hair, some of his faeces, a bone 

 picked by him and dropped, a shred of his opos- 

 sum rug, will suffice. Even his saliva may be 

 picked up and used for his destruction." 



The explanation of all this, which I have long 

 sought, is given in the very words of one of 

 Mr. Howitt's informers, who said, " You see, 

 when a blackfellow doctor gets hold of something 

 belonging to a man and roasts it with things, and 

 sings over it, the fire catches hold of the smell of 

 the man [italics mine], and that settles the poor 

 fellow." In other words, the smallest part of a 

 man. or of any thing he has touched, will suffice 

 to give the demon his scent. 



Of course, customs survive millenniums after 

 the cause of their origin is forgotten, and it is 

 scarcely probable that those who carefully burn 

 their waste hair and nails do so to avoid giving 



