“The practice of cutting the hair of the head and the beard is attended with a prodigious increase of the secretion of the matter of hair. It is ascertained that a man of fifty years of age will have cut from his head above thirteen feet, or twice his own length of hair; and of his beard, in the last twenty-five years of the same period—above eight feet. The hair likewise besides this enormous length, will be thicker than if it had been left uncut, and must lose most of its juices by evaporation from having its tube and the ends of its fibres always exposed.—The custom of shaving the beard, and cutting the hair of the head, has we believe, been justly deprecated by some physiologists. The latter has been supposed, and with much apparent reason, to weaken the understanding, by diverting the blood from the brain to the surface of the head. The connection which exists between the beard and the organs of generation, and likewise between the muscular strength of the individual, would seem to render it improper to interfere with its natural mode of growth. Bichat attributes the superior strength of the ancients to their custom of wearing their beards; and those men who do not shave at present are distinguished for vigor and hardihood.” Thus far we have had to deal only with a grave folly, and I shall follow the writer no farther. What would John Wesley and Daniel Dove have said to the speculations and assertions in this curious passage? They were both men of reading, both speculative men and both professors, each in his way, of the art of medicine. They would have asked what proof could be produced that men who let their beards grow are stronger than those who shave, or that the ancients were superior in bodily strength to the men of the present day? Thus they would have treated his assumed facts; and for his philosophy, they would have inferred, that if cutting the hair weakened the understanding, and the story of Samson were a physical allegory, the person who wrote and reasoned thus must have been sheared at least twice a week from his childhood. If on the other hand they had been assured that the writer had worn his hair long, then they would have affirmed that, as in the case of the Agonist, it was “robustious to no purpose.” When the Russian soldiers were first compelled to part with their beards that they might look like other European troops, they complained that the cold struck into their jaws and gave them the tooth-ache. The sudden deprivation of a warm covering might have occasioned this and other local affections. But they are not said to have complained that they had lost their wits.