SOME LADIES OF THE OLD SCHOOL. 527 fashion. He passes over Egypt ; perhaps because of the superabundance of material illustrating his subject which the Egyptian collections present to view. If he had con- fined his work to such a testimony as the Egyptian tombs have yielded, he could have made a volume ten times the size of the modest discourse with which he has been so good as to favor us. One of the absurd Egyptian fashions appears to have been of some service. Herodotus tells us that, when he was on his travels, he once walked over a battle-field where the Egyptians and the Persians had fought some years before. '<I observed," he says, " that the skulls of the Persians were so soft that you could perforate them with a small pebble, while those of the Egyptians were so strong that with difficulty you could break them with a large stone." Upon inquiring into the cause of this, he was informed that it was owing to the different head fashions of Egypt and Persia. In Egypt it was the fashion for mothers to shave the heads even of young children, leaving only a lock or two in front, behind, and one on each side ; and while thus shorn they were allowed to go out into the sun without hats. The Persians, on the contrary, wore their hair long, and protected themselves from the sun by soft caps. "We learn also from this passage in Herodotus, that it was not the fashion in his time to bury the dead after a battle. All the ancient civilized races took great liberties with their hair, as well as with the hair of other people. Persons of rank in Egypt, after shaving off their own hair, wore wigs to distinguish them from bare-headed peasants. A still more inconvenient fashion of Egyptian dandies was the wearing of false beards upon the chin, composed of plaited hair, and varying in length according to the rank of the wearer. We find that, in all the ancient civilizations, fashion selected similar objects upon 32
