OF THE HUMAN SKIN. 73 



customers. It is very true that there are enough 

 medical men who do not advertise, and yet are 

 arrant quacks ; but it is still truer that all those 

 who do, in any form, are sure to be impostors, 

 who live and grow rich by fleecing the credulous. 

 Scald-head, honeycomb ringworm, or, in tech- 

 nical language, favus, is the first of the parasitic 

 cutaneous diseases we will attempt to describe. 

 It depends on the presence of a vegetable forma- 

 tion, called achorion Schonleini, from Prof. Shon- 

 lein, who discovered the fungus. This fungus 

 consists of numerous little oval or rounded bodies, 

 which are the spores or sporules we described in a 

 previous number ; they are about one three-thou- 

 sandth of an inch in diameter. Besides these, 

 there are numerous tubes, varying in diameter ; their 

 subdivision forming the spores, as seen in the figure 

 accompanying the previous article on this subject. 

 Favus attacks three separate structures of the 

 skin : namely, the openings of the little follicles 

 from which the hair grows, the epidermis or scarf- 

 skin, and the nails. The hair follicles are the most 

 frequent seat of the disease, and it is most com- 

 mon on the scalp. When the fungus starts to 

 grow, little yellow specks are seen scattered here 



