served by a recent writer on dress that the history of the hat is a true history of the sufferings of the male head, from the kettle-shaped brown helmet to the modern cylinder."

It is this apparent want of rationality in dress that fits it in an eminent degree to be the theme of the cynic and misanthrope. In any case the vast amount of attention given to the labor of covering up and prettifying this poor mortal body would be sure to lead the philosopher to reflect on the vanity of all things human. But when it is added to this that a large part of the toil expended by mankind in clothing itself has brought forth nothing temporarily useful or even intrinsically beautiful, the least amount of reflection is sufficient to discover the rich vein of irony which underlies the subject. Indeed, we know nothing so well adapted to correct a too flattering view of the species as to brood for an hour in serious meditation over a history of costume.

Ís, then, the philosophy of dress nothing more than a specially amusing chapter in the cynic's version of life as a whole? Can nothing be said by way of extenuation, if not of justification, of the vagaries of the human race in the matter of garments? We think something may be said. On closer inspection there appears after all to have been a method in the madness of mankind in this particular. Under all that is arbitrary, accidental, and unsusceptible of rational explanation, we may find traces of a sane purpose. The theory of the misanthrope, however picturesque and striking, is, like many other picturesque and striking theories, an exaggeration. Dress has a raison d'être over and above the mere exhibition of the stupendous and incorrigible folly of human nature. However mixed up with and disguised by elements of irrational caprice, principles may be detected which serve to redeem the art of dress from the sweeping condemnation of the satirist. Let us take up the cause of humanity in this matter, and see what can be said for its behavior.

It may be well to begin with the somewhat obvious remark that dress is so far natural as it is the extension of one of Nature's own endowments. It is commonly said that man clothes him

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self for four principal reasons: 1stly, by way of protection against external forces; 2dly, for the sake of warmth; 3dly, for purposes of ornament; and, lastly, for moral reasons. Now Nature clearly supplies animals, including man, with the rudiments of dress in the first three senses, if not in the fourth. horns of many quadrupeds, the beaks and talons of birds, and the nails of our own species, are the germs of a defensive dress. That animals needing to maintain bodily heat are clothed with some form of non-conducting covering is too well known to require mentioning. Finally, the researches of Mr. Darwin and other naturalists have taught us that many features of the animal teguments have been retained, if not acquired, as ornamental adjuncts.

In a large sense, then, dress is based on Nature's own processes, and this simple fact must be sufficient to rescue the art from the charge of being something utterly unnatural and absurd. More than this, it may be said that Nature specially enjoined man to dress himself. By leaving him with less defensive, protective, and protective, and ornamental covering than many other animals, she seems to have said that she trusted to his finer brain to invent the means of providing for himself a suitable outfit. In fact, man might quite as appropriately be defined as an animal that has to dress itself as he has been defined as an animal that cooks its food.

We may see the close connection between Nature's clothing and man's artificial clothing in another way. Our hair is perfectly insentient; the hair-dresser can lacerate it without exciting any sensation. Yet we instinctively think of it as part of our sentient organism; and when the skin of the head is sensitive, and pressure on the head causes a disagreeable feeling, we project this feeling to the hair tips. In quite the same way we come to include our apparel in our own conception of our bodily organism. The same psychological principle that explains our localizing sensation in the extremity of the hair explains a lady's feeling a rude disarrangement of her dress-trimmings as though it were a direct attack on her organism. Subjectively, then-that is, in our way of thinking and feeling-dress stands in

If it is once allowed that dress of some kind is natural to man, it will be impossible to reject the conclusion that, viewed on the whole, the progress of dress, from the first crude tentatives of our primitive ancestors to our modern elaborate costumes, has many points of resemblance to a natural process of development. If there were good reasons for man's beginning to dress himself in the early stages of his existence, there have been equally good reasons for his advancing in that direction. Just as the first naïve experiment was adapted to early wants and conditions of life, so, speaking roughly, the intricate system of apparel of the civilized man of to-day is adapted to our present wants and conditions. And the progress from one style to the other, so far as history and other records enable us to say, has been by a series of very gradual transitions, exactly answering to those by which organic forms are now supposed to have arisen.

To give an illustration of this process. The modern shoe has been evolved by a succession of slight modifications and enlargements out of a very simple primitive covering. In the ages of stone and bronze, man appears to have protected his foot by a piece of bark or leather laid under the sole and fastened in a very simple manner about the foot with straps. Out of this grew the sandal with its broader and more elaborate bands, reaching above the ankles, such as we see it represented in the art of ancient Egypt, and later. From the sandal, again, was developed, by the addition of a fine leather below the straps, as well as the broadening of the straps, the germ of the shoe proper, an arrangement illustrated by the Greek half-boot (кpηi). The completion of this process of development was the doing away with the band, and the making of the upper leather firmer.

A closer inspection of the process by which the art of dress has grown to its present elaborate form will show that it conforms very closely to the idea of evolution as defined by modern writers. It is obvious that dress has a very close connection with the human organism to which it has to mould itself, and of

may be viewed as a kind of extension or enlargement. And the development of dress seems to mimic the process of organic evolution itself. We may describe its history in its large features as a gradual process of adaptation to the structure of the body. And this process has, of necessity, imitated that of organic development as now conceived.* If we take the first rude article of apparel, out of which all dress seems to have grown-the waist-band, or rudimentary apron-and compare it with a modern equipment, we may see at once that the two contrast with one another very much as a low and a high organism. The one is simple, homogeneous, not differentiated into parts, and but loosely adapted to the bodily form; the other is highly complex, differentiated into a number of unlike parts, all of which are closely adapted to the structural divisions of the body to which they belong. The one is the work of the weaver alone; the other implies the constructive work of the seamstress or tailor.

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The early and comparatively structureless type of dress may be seen surviving even in classic costume. The outer garment, the amictus, which included the male pallium (iμáτiov) and the female peplum (TÉTλos), was a structureless rectangular piece of cloth, and, as the ety-, mology of the word (amicere) shows, was wrapped round the figure; while the inner garment (tunica, xítóv) was said to be put on" (induere). Thus it represented, in its want of a fitting shape, the primitive undifferentiated covering. Modern dress, as a whole, is pre-eminently an organic system, consisting of many heterogeneous parts, fashioned in conformity to the several divisions of the bodily structure to which it has to accommodate itself. In it are to be found only occasional survivals of the earlier form, as in the shawl and Scotch plaid. It has been pointed out by the writer

*The parallelism between the development of dress and organic development has been worked out in some of its aspects in a very ingenious work entitled "Naturgeschichte der Kleidung," von Emanuel Hermann (Vienna, 1878). The present writer gladly acknowledges his obligations to this suggestive little book.

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to whom reference has already been made, that the form of the various articles of dress has adapted itself not only to the structure but to the functions of the parts of the organism to be covered. He divides garments into three groups of articles Istly, those of the extremities-the head, the hands, and the feet; 2dly, those of the connecting organs the neck, arms, and legs; and, 3dly, those of the fixed trunk. The first having to adapt themselves to the most mobile and active members of the body, are the freest, being most perfectly detached from the others, and most easily put on and off. The coverings of the neck, arms, and legs, which are the transmitters of force, and share to some extent in the work of the extremities, come midway in point of mobility between those of the extremities and of the trunk. The clothing of the latter, which is comparatively at rest, is, as might have been expected, the most fixed and rigid of all.

With this development of dress in beterogeneity and speciality of form, there has been a preservation of organic unity. This has, of course, been necessitated to some extent by the fact that all parts of the costume were related to the organic structure of the body. It is easy to see that the development of any particular branch of clothing has been correlated with that of other branches. 'The modern development of the covering of the male leg curiously illustrates this law of the correlation of growth. Thus the appearance of the first hose covering the thigh, leg, and foot, about the eleventh century, was connected with the shortening of the coat about that time. A further shortening of this last garment was followed by the production of the upper hose as a covering for the thighs only (sixteenth century). And the gradual lengthening of this article of dress downward till it attained its present form of loose trouser at the time of the French Revolution, was naturally followed by the shortening of the under hose and its transformation into the stocking, and finally into the sock.

This gradual development of dress in extent and complexity has in the main been brought about by the action of the deepest force at work in this region,

namely, the need of retaining bodily warmth. This need must obviously have increased as soon as our race began to migrate to less warmer regions than those in which it is supposed to have been cradled. In addition to this change in the environment, there has been a change in the organism tending to the same result. With the progress of civilized life all our sensibilities appear to have grown more delicate, and the organism of a lady or gentleman living in London in the nineteenth century is incomparably more susceptible to changing conditions of temperature, etc., in the atmosphere than that of one of their hardy Saxon ancestors. This change in sensibility, though no doubt in part the effect of elaborate dress, is also its most fundamental cause. stands in intimate relation with all the habits of an advanced state of civilization, such as our mode of heating our dwellings, and so on. One may say, indeed, that man has slowly learned to make, out of dress, a sort of second skin. How much our garments have become a part of us in this way is seen in the helplessness of a person when he loses any part of his equipment. To have to go into the open air bareheaded is a trial to a modern Englishman, and it is, perhaps, a sense of this natural necessity of clothes which underlies the pathos that combines with the absurdity of the situation when a man is suddenly rendered hatless by a gust of wind.

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The progress of the art of clothing is marked by a gradual increase in the number of enveloping layers, so that dress may be regarded as building itself up just like a real organic tegument by adding stratum to stratum. In the second place, this progress is characterized by an increase in the degree of fitness to the several parts of the organism. In each of these ways clothing becomes better adapted to fulfil its most important function-the keeping of the bodily surface at a comparatively equal temperature.

The second great factor in bringing about this development of dress is the need of free, unimpeded movement. This force must, it is obvious be, to some extent opposed to the needs of warmth. Every addition to the number of articles of clothing is a slight increase in the

difficulties of locomotion. A system of heavy bandages tells on a man in a long walk in more ways than one. The result of this opposition has been the invention of materials of clothing which combine lightness with warmth. Such materials gradually come to displace others by a process akin to that of the natural selection of organic modifications which bring an advantage to their possessor.

The change from a loose enveloping fold to a closely-fitting one, which, as we have seen, is the other result of a growing demand for a non-conducting integument, seems also to satisfy the needs of free movement. We venture to affirm that an Englishman of to-day can both walk more freely and swing his arms more amply as he walks, than an ancient Roman in his iμártov, or pallium. The case in which tightness of fit is most plainly unfavorable to free movement is that of a modern lady's skirts; but then this is not really the case of adaptation to particular parts and members.

Tightness of dress would in general, and within reasonable limits, only prove unfavorable to movement through its injurious influence on the respiratory and other functions of the skin. And here, too, there is to be noticed a progress in the direction of the most advantageous arrangement. Modern dress, in con-trast to earlier forms, seeks to combine a certain degree of porousness with closeness of fit. A glance at the leg of a peasant of the Roman Campagna may tell us how much advancing civilization has done for our limbs in the way of rendering them accessible to the air. The first rude skin garments must, one fancies, apart from their weight, have proved "stuffy" in more senses than

one.

To a considerable extent, then, the ends of free and easy movement, both of the whole body and of the separate limbs, have concurrently been satisfied by those changes of dress which have been, in the first place, due rather to the more urgent need of accumulating and retaining bodily heat. It is to be added, however, that the advance of civilization tends very materially to lessen the importance of the secondary end. The civilized man is not called upon to do the feats of agility which are required

of the savage. When he has to perform a series of nimble movements he is pretty certain to look a little awkward. A respectably-dressed citizen suddenly forced to get out of the road of a runaway horse is apt to be a ludicrous spectacle. But then runaway horses are rare phenomena, as the story of "John Gilpin" amply testifies, and the demands made on the flesh of the languid Englishman of to-day in this way are exceedingly light. Nothing better illustrates the absence of the need of rapid movement in our modern form of civilization than the huge erection of the hat. savage liable to sudden invasion by his enemies would, we may be certain, never have taken to our modern cylindrical head-covering.

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Along with these ends of warmth and freedom of movement it may be well to mention the need of protection against natural forces. This seems to have exercised an influence on the covering of the upper and lower extremities of the body only. The hat with its horizontal brim has clearly a reference to the sun's rays -a force which we may be sure our hardier ancestors were not wont to regard as a hostile one. The parasol and the fan, which last the Southern lady knows how to use so gracefully out of doors, may be regarded as an extension of this protective species of apparel. At the other extreme the foot has learned to defend itself against the ruder forces to which it is constantly exposed. In each case the progress of the protective covering in efficiency appears to be related to an increase of sensibility. It might, perhaps, be thought that civilization would tend to reduce the evils of the foot by making rough places smooth. But as long as London vestries use the gravel which they now use for making and mending their paths, this long-suffering member will not dare to relax its precautions.

The progress of dress may be viewed in part, then, as the resultant of these various forces, answering to obvious needs of organic life.* How far they may severally have contributed to the

* No reference has been made here to the need of protection against adverse social forces, since it is only by a stretching of language that the sword, or its modern survival the cane, can be called an article of dress.