HAIR; HAIR-WORKING. The hairy coverings of animals are composed of long delicate processes of a horny substance, which grow from bulbs situated in or beneath the skin. Human hair is more or less flat tened, so that a transverse section presents an elliptical form, or sometimes, from one side being grooved, has the shape of a bean. The hair of the whiskers, beard, and mustachios, and in general all short curly hair is most flattened. In most instances flatness and cur liness are directly proportionate, and both attain their maximum in the crisp woolly hairs of the negro, which are sometimes as much as two thirds broader in one direction than in the other. Except at their base the hairs are perfectly solid, and in most animals their substance is similar through out. The hair of the head is sometimes known to have attained a length of seven or eight feet.
Hairs are very elastic ; they admit of being stretched nearly one third of their length, and regain their original length almost com pletely; in proportion to their size they are very tough and firm. In chemical properties hair resembles horn, nails, &c. It is soluble in water at a very high temperature, as in a Papin's digester, leaving a large quantity of oil mixed with sulphuret of iron, and some sulphuretted hydrogen. It is this oil, with the sulphuret of iron, which gives the colour to the hair, and by whose absorption grayness is produced. The iron is most abundant in the darkest hair, and the sulphur is the in gredient on which the action of the various black dyes for red or gray hair depends.
In the manufacture of hair into various articles of use and ornament, the hair of different animals is employed ; but the most singular feature connected with the manufac ture is the hair harvest in France. Young women in England, who have beautiful tresses, are often urged by poverty to part with them for money to the hair-workers ; but in France it is a regular system. There are hair merchants in Paris, who send agents in the spring of each year into the country dis tricts to purchase the tresses of young women, who seek to obtain an annual crop with the same care as a farmer would a field crop.
The agents frequent fairs and markets ; and have with them a stock of handkerchiefs, mus lins, ribbons, &c., which they give in exchange for the hair. So sensitive a barometer is commerce, of slight changes in the value of exchangeable goods, that the agents know the hair of a particular district to be worth a few sous more per pound than that of a district thirty or forty miles away : a fact which natu ralists would have been long in finding out. It is estimated that 200,000 lbs. of hair is purchased at each spring harvest. The price paid is about five francs per lb. The agents send the hair to their employers, by whom it is dressed and sorted, and sold to the hair workers in the chief towns at about ten francs per lb. That which is to be made into perukes is purchased by a particular class of persons, by whom it is cleaned, curled, prepared to a certain stage, and sold to the peruke maker at twenty to eighty francs per lb. The peruke maker gives it the form which, as is well known, commands a very high price; a peruke is often sold for double its weight in silver.
In respect both to the hair itself, and to perukes and other articles made of hair, France supplies a considerable quantity to England and the United States. The im portations of hair, and of manufactured goods in which hair is the only or chief material, have lately been to the value of about 20,000/. annually.
Differences are observed in manufactures from curly or from straight hair ; the former is spun into a kind of elastic cord ; while the latter is woven into cloth for sieves, or damask hair chair bottoms. The hair here spoken of is horse hair, obtained chiefly from the tail. It may be dyed of various tints. The mode of weaving horse hair cloth does not differ essen tially from other kinds of weaving: there are a few minor adjustments of the loom neces sary, to accommodate the rigidity of the ma terial. In many kinds of such cloth the warp is made of black linen thread or yarn. The cloth is hot calendered after weaving to give it a gloss. The manufacture of hair pencils is noticed in a later article. [PENCILS.]