also for holding it
in place after it has been arranged; the word is also applied, from
resemblance in form or in use, to various appliances employed for
dressing wool and other fibrous substances, to the indented fleshy crest
of a cock, and to the ridged series of cells of wax filled with honey in
a beehive. Hair combs are of great antiquity, and specimens made of
wood, bone and horn have been found in Swiss lake-dwellings. Among the
Greeks and Romans they were made of boxwood, and in Egypt also of ivory.
For modern combs the same materials are used, together with others such
as tortoise-shell, metal, india-rubber and celluloid. There are two
chief methods of manufacture. A plate of the selected material is taken
of the size and thickness required for the comb, and on one side of it,
occasionally on both sides, a series of fine slits are cut with a
circular saw. This method involves the loss of the material cut out
between the teeth. The second method, known as "twinning" or "parting,"
avoids this loss and is also more rapid. The plate of material is rather
wider than before, and is formed into two combs simultaneously, by the
aid of a twinning machine. Two pairs of chisels, the cutting edges of
which are as long as the teeth are required to be and are set at an
angle converging towards the sides of the plate, are brought down
alternately in such a way that the wedges removed from one comb form the
teeth of the other, and that when the cutting is complete the plate
presents the appearance of two combs with their teeth exactly
inosculating or dovetailing into each other. In india-rubber combs the
teeth are moulded to shape and the whole hardened by vulcanization.

COMBACONUM, or KUMBAKONAM, a city of British India, in the Tanjore
district of Madras, in the delta of the Cauvery, on the South Indian
railway, 194 m. from Madras. Pop. (1901) 59,623, showing an increase of
10% in the decade. It is a large town with wide and airy streets, and is
adorned with pagodas, gateways and other buildings of considerable
pretension. The great _gopuram_, or gate-pyramid, is one of the most
imposing buildings of the kind, rising in twelve stories to a height of
upwards of 100 ft., and ornamented with a profusion of figures of men
and animals formed in stucco. One of the water-tanks in the town is
popularly reputed to be filled with water admitted from the Ganges every
twelve years by a subterranean passage 1200 m. long; and it conse