WHY WE CROW CRAY.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XVIII, Issue III, 16 January 1897, Page 60

WHY WE CROW CRAY.

Few persons know that the hair is a barometer of a man’s health and character, and that it is influenced by his mental condition from time to time. History tells us that Louis the Severe of Bavaria, became gray over night after murdering a number of vassals who were too attentive to his wife. Sir Toomas More, Henry VIII’s great Chancellor, and Marie Antoinette are said to have turned gray in the night after being informed of their doom. No one has doubted these things until the new school of physiologists, being unable to account for the phenomena, declared them unworthy of belief. And this in the face of fact that the experience of many persons of the present day supported the theory. The hair consists of a root, a shaft and a tip, the latter two being the projecting parts. Its substance is composed of a horny material containing the pigment granules, which are developed in the root and the colour of which depends on the presence of a peculiar oil, sepia tint in dark hair, blood red in red hair and yellowish in fair hair. While it has been generally admitted that the hair of all mammalia has nerve connection, a similar state of affairs has been denied with reference to human hair until quite recently. The past lack of knowledge accounts for the skepticism of modern physiologists. Their argument was eminently logical. If nerve activity did not reach the hair root it could not affect it. The grayness of hair commences at the hair bulb, where the cells are produced, and rises upward to the tip. It is caused by a deficiency, and the degeneration, respectively of the pigment.’ The colouring stuff either gives out or retrogrades.