"Had I wist, O Spring," said the swallow, "That hope was a sunlit mist, And the faint, light heart of it hollow, Thy woods had not heard me sing; Thy winds had not known my wing; It had faltered ere thine did, Spring, Had I wist." --_Swinburne._ SKIN. W. E. WATT. One said he wondered that lether was not dearer than any other thing. Being demanded a reason: because, saith he, it is more stood upon than any other thing in the world.--_Hazlitt._ What! is the jay more precious than the lark, Because his feathers are more beautiful? Or is the adder better than the eel, Because his painted skin contents the eye? --_Shakespeare._ A gilded live pig is a sight rarely seen. The rarity of putting gold leaf all over a living animal of any kind comes from the fact that the animal dies so soon after the operation. It has been tried several times and always with the same result. The idea arose from an experiment unfortunately performed upon a child on the accession of Leo X. to the papal chair. The child was gilded all over to represent the Golden Age. The people of Florence were delighted with the idea, but the death of the child took place so quickly that some thought the brief duration of the Golden Age was miraculously represented as well as its great glory. The experiment has never been repeated upon a human subject, but men of science cautiously tried to find out the secret of the child's living but a few hours after the operation, and so gilded pigs and varnished rabbits and other small animals. From such tests of the value of an open skin to animal life they found that all things that have breath must have open skin pores in order to maintain life. Closing the pores of the skin causes the temperature to fall directly and the heart and lungs become gorged with blood. The circulation of the blood is seriously interfered with and death follows with the usual symptoms of asphyxiation. Strange as it seemed to those who first witnessed such experiments, the life of an animal is more directly dependent upon the action of the skin than upon that of the stomach, the liver, or even the brain. Monstrosities have been born without brains; but they have frequently lived for some time, taking their food regularly and having the appearance of as much comfort as others of their kind with brains. They died early, but their life was uniformly longer than the time which elapsed after the application of a coating which stopped the skin of other animals until death ensued.