The subject of our discourse is not only a disagreeable but too often a painful one. Not only is the mere mention of the creature's name of which we are to speak tabooed and avoided by the refined and polite, but the creature itself has become extinct and banished from the society of the good and respectable. Indeed under such happy auspices do a large proportion of the civilized world now live that their knowledge of the habits and form of a louse may be represented by a blank. Not so with some of their great-great-grandfathers and grandmothers, if history, sacred and profane, poetry,[5] and the annals of literature testify aright; for it is comparatively a recent fact in history that the louse has awakened to find himself an outcast and an alien. Among savage nations of all climes, some of which have been dignified with the apt, though high sounding name of Phthiriophagi, and among the Chinese and other semi-civilized peoples, these lords of the soil still flourish with a luxuriance and rankness of growth that never diminishes, so that we may say without exaggeration that certain mental traits and fleshly appetites induced by their consumption as an article of food may have been created, while a separate niche in our anthropological museums is reserved for the instruments of warfare, both offensive and defensive, used by their phthiriophagous hunters. Then have we not in the very centres of civilization the poor and degraded, which are most faithfully attended lay these revolting satellites!