excite the sensations of taste and smell; and
as their forms and degrees of impulse are
almost infinitely diversified, the sensibility of
pain or pleasure arising therefrom must be
varied almost infinitely, according to the
greater or less delicacy of the organs they
strike on. Are you, judicious reader, able to
confirm or refute the hypothesis? Or do
you hold that the savouriness of salt is the
result of a delicate galvanic action on the
surface of the tongue? Unfortunately, the
question is a poser for my own poor noddle.

Minute portions of what we call the larger
creatures are not less interesting than minute
creatures themselves in their integrity. Thus:
not to risk a more precise definition, the
popular notion of a hair, or of hairs, is a
something long, cylindrical, and wire-like as
to proportion, and single, simple, or
undivided as to shape; unquestionably smooth
in respect to surface. But hairs are subject
to all sorts of freaks and caprices; they start
off into complexities of which you never
dreamt them capable. I fancy I discover an
agreement of whim in the hairs from
creatures of the same natural family and with
similar instincts. Certain tribes seem to
have made it their study to supply us with
wool whose serrated or scaly edges shall
furnish us with blankets, hosen, and hats
from the close-felting properties which they
induce. Mouse's hair is jointed, and
seemingly made up of back-bone-like divisions,
which are shown by alternate bands of
black and transparent material. For easier
inspection, take the lock of hairs you mean
to treasure in your casket from the belly
or armpits of the animal, as finer in texture
and more translucent. The tips in which
they terminate are pointed and polished in
most workmanlike style.

Other small rodents—the loir, or larger
dormouse, for instance—exhibit an analogous
furry structure. The hair of bats is still
more surprising. Generally, it is as if you
were to place a lot of long-spouted funnels
one within the other, so as to leave a
considerable distance from funnel to funnel. An
Indian bat is generally selected to furnish
show-hair; but our native bats deserve
attention, though their fur is rather spiral
than cup-shaped in its pattern. The mole, a
worm and insect-eater, furnishes hair which
has a slight vespertilineous touch superadded
to the rodent type. A series of protuberances
are visible along the hair, like the wooden
knobs by which a flag-staff is mounted. But
on the same beast—nay, on man himself—the
constitution of bristles varies according to
the spot on which they grow. We may liken
hair to a genus of plants, of which one species
is a native of the eyebrows, another of the
beard; a third thrives in the lowlands of the
legs, while Alpine hairs betake themselves to
the summit of the head. As a rule, the hairs
of insects are more complicated than those of
quadrupeds. Amongst insects, the hairs of
larvae and caterpillars are more elaborate
than those of the creature in its perfect (or
rather, its final, because all is perfect) form.
Nevertheless, the orange hairs from the red-
tailed bee, and the black, white, and yellow
ones from the great queen humble-bee, are
beautifully transparent wands,—something
like the stem of the white lily without the
flowers but with the leaves. But another
hairy dandy, Dermestes, the gay young larva
of a beetle who is fond of frequenting bacon-
shops, sports for his personal adornment a
pretty lot of test-objects, which are, like the
lily-stem, complete with the flowers, which
droop in a graceful bouquet from the top.

The next time you meet a hairy
caterpillar, stop him, and even were it on the
Queen's highway, rob him of two or three
tufts of hair. You need not maltreat him, or
do him personal injury. Simply twitch out
with a pair of pincers the souvenir you want
to put into your locket; but spare his life,
and let him go home to his anxious friends,
tossing his head disdainfully. Or, instead of
allowing him to get off so easily, suppose you
put him into prison, Bomba-wise, because his
beard and whiskers are too long to your
liking, and keep him there, without benefit
of habeas corpus. By feeding your captive,
you may keep him alive till his natural term
of caterpillar existence is expired. He will
undergo metamorphosis; and you can
compare the scales which he wears as a butterfly
or a moth with the bristles which beset him
while a creeping thing, and which may have
rendered good service in his juvenile days.
One young larva whom I partially plucked,
had spiny prickly fur of two or three kinds;
besides those, some of his longest and
handsomest hairs were in shape, not in colour,
like a peacock's tail-feathers. These thorny,
branching, sharp-pointed hairs, are a more
formidable-looking defensive armour than the
quills of the prickliest porcupine in Africa.
All these tiny hairs are to be examined
whole and at once, as far as the field
of the microscope will admit them. But
lovers of minims chop up larger hairs
into the thinnest possible slices, exactly as
you would your five-shilling April cucumber,
and serve them cold with Canada balsam,
instead of with pepper, oil, and vinegar.
How else could we examine the elementary
structure of the whiskers, smellers, manes,
and tufts of sundry wild beasts,—the spines
of hedgehogs, the quills of porcupines, and
the horns of rhinoceroses? all which are
eccentric hairs in disguise, who escape
running mad by a narrow shave.

Let us not quite forget the hairs of vegetables.
In some, as in those of the Tradescantia
or spider-wort, a circulation is visible. The
fresh-gathered leaf of a French bean is adhesive
to the touch, without being clammy or
glutinous. You will find the phenomenon to
result from little hooked hairs which by hold