skin hardened with tannic acid. Tannic acid is
found in a great many plants and trees and fruits,
and, among others, in tea, being in the proportion
of one to four of every pound of tea put into the
pot; but oak-bark and acorns give the chief
amount of that used for converting skin into
leather. Not that all leather is made from
skins; for a full-grown ox has a " hide," and a
two-year-old a " kip," and only calves and cats,
dogs, rats, and mice, and other small deer, have
"skins," according to the science of the tanner.
A split skin is a " skiver," and skivers are used
where very thin leather is required. Ox-hides
make shoe-soles and harness; horse-hides, ladies'
shoes; and cow-hides, the soles; calf-skin the soft
upper leathers; sheep-skins, treated with oil, are
known to men as chamois and morocco leathers,
and the skins of she-goats, prepared with lime,
and scraped and polished, come out into a new
existence as parchment; the skins of calves,
kids, and dead-born lambs, make vellum— the
nobility of parchment; drum-heads are from the
hides of goats and wolves, battledores are
covered with what was once the skin of an ass;
lamb-skins, tanned with willow-bark, make
gloves; deer-skins bind books, and are also
transmuted into morocco; so with goat-skins,
which thus do more than get converted into
vellum; seal-skins become black enamelled
leather for boots and shoes, bags and dressing-
cases; buck-skins and doe-skins make breeches
and gloves; pig-skins are made into saddles
and the coverings of church-books; rat-skins,
gloves—a large trade in Paris now, where
the sewers are utilised for the purpose; the
famous Limerick " chicken gloves," packed in a
walnut-shell, and sold for five shillings the pair,
were made of the skins of very young calves—
antenatal calves, say some; Russia leather is
tanned with willow-bark, and dyed red with
aromatic sanders-wood, to which is added the
oil of birch, which gives it its peculiar smell
and insectifuge qualities. No skin resists the
action of tannic-acid; and from men to mice
no warm-blooded animal has an untannable hide:
but the human skin is the least susceptible of
all. So the gentleman who has left his hide to
the library, on condition of its being made into
vellum and inscribed with the Odyssey and
Iliad in full, has bequeathed a troublesome
legacy to posterity. As for bones, you get a
good deal out of them—phosphorus for lucifer-
matches; gelatine for jellies, size, and glue; fat
for soap and candles; beside buttons, combs,
knife-handles, and many other things out of the
solid substance; and phosphates and carbonates
for manure.

Man does not get only leather and parchment
from the skins of his special and peculiar beasts;
he gets also fur—his leather with the hair on,
and no tannic acid superadded. First, there is
the Russian sable, king of the weasels, which,
in the time of Henry the Eighth, no nobleman
under the rank of a viscount, might wear; which
lines the robes of our Lord Mayor and his
Council in breadths according to their
municipal degrees; and the tail-tips of which make
our painters' best brushes; and not only the
Russian, but the American sable also, not
quite so fine in colour or so rich in texture,
but not to be derided by connoisseurs. Then
there is the ermine, queen of the weasels, spotless
and symbolic, which Edward the Third
commanded should be worn only by the royal
family, which is forbidden to the community
even now in Austria, and which, when the
black tips are made out of Astracan lamb-skin,
is known under the name of miniver,
and indicates the rank of the noble wearer.
Edward the Third was a mighty fur-fancier,
and forbade the use of any kind to those whose
incomes were under a hundred a year; and he
instituted the Skinners' Company, which had the
monopoly of the whole fur trade, in every
branch. Then there are the soft grey
chinchillas; stone and pine martens; skunks and
polecats—the last two very disagreeable to
sensitive noses, but purified now by some new
process of chemical perfuming; lynxes, for ladies'
wear; minxes, musquashes, and monkey-skins
—Colobus Satanas, the black, and the Diana
monkey, the grey; red, grey, white, blue, cross,
silver, and Kitt foxes—and these are very
fine furs, as witness that imperial pelisse
belonging to the Czar, and exhibited in 'fifty-one,
made out of the black necks of silver foxes,
and worth three thousand five hundred pounds.
Wolves give a pretty yellow-hued fur, too, but
coarseish and rough, used chiefly for coat-
linings and sleigh-coverings—the scoundrel
wolves! one ought to make something by them!
—while bears, of almost as many colours as
foxes, clothe the Greenlanders from head to
foot, and give us our best pomade into the
bargain. The Dutch breed cats for the sake of
their fur, and they give beautiful skins when
properly fed and selected—is there not a
cat-skin rug at South Kensington, beautiful enough
for a queen?—lions and tigers are chiefly
trophies and rugs, but the Chinese spread a tiger-skin
over their seat of justice, and the royal
hussar body-guard of Hungarian noblemen wear
leopard-skin mantles. The national coat, though,
in Hungary is the Astracan lamb-skin, that soft,
short-tufted, and glossy-black link between fur
and wool, which we use rarely. The Persian
lamb-skins, all in little round formal curls, are
made so by tying up the new-born lambkin in a
tight wrapper, which compresses the young curl
as effectually as hair-papers, and so produces
the curious fur known by that name. Otter-skin
is soft and lovely; the sea-otter especially
so; and in Russia and China immensely prized.
A muff of sea-otter skin would be twenty-five
guineas, and a whole skin forty guineas. Seal-skin
is another very lovely fur, seldom seen in
its natural colour, but generally dyed to a rich
Vandyke brown. The seal-skin of commerce is
not the fur of the animal as seen on its back.
There and then, it is a long-haired, coarse,
ignoble-looking affair, but, when the Skinners'
Company gets hold of it, it is soaked and
fermented, which loosens the long hairs, and they
fall out of their own accord, or else it is shaved