t this was
confined to a spot on the back of the head 1 1/2 inches in length. Her
hair soon became striped, and in seven years was totally white. The
same article speaks of a girl in Bedfordshire, Maria Seeley, aged
eight, whose face was swarthy, and whose hair was long and dark on one
side and light and short on the other. One side of her body was also
brown, while the other side was light and fair. She was seen by the
faculty in London, but no cause could be established.

Voigtel mentions the occurrence of canities almost suddenly. Bichat
had a personal acquaintance whose hair became almost entirely gray in
consequence of some distressing news that reached him. Cassan records a
similar case. According to Rayer, a woman by the name of Perat,
summoned before the Chamber of Peers to give evidence in the trial of
the assassin Louvel, was so much affected that her hair became entirely
white in a single night Byron makes mention of this peculiar anomaly in
the opening stanzas of the "Prisoner of Chillon:"--

"My hair is gray, but not with years, Nor grew it white In a single
night. As men's have grown from sudden fears."

The commentators say that Byron had reference to Ludovico Sforza and
others. The fact of the change is asserted of Marie Antoinette, the
wife of Louis XVI, though in not quite so short a period, grief and not
fear being the cause. Ziemssen cites Landois' case of a compositor of
thirty-four who was admitted to a hospital July 9th with symptoms of
delirium tremens; until improvement began to set in (July 13th) he was
continually tormented by terrifying pictures of the imagination. In the
night preceding the day last mentioned the hair of the head and beard
of the patient, formerly blond, became gray. Accurate examination by
Landois showed the pigment contents of the hair to be unchanged, and
led him to believe that the white color was solely due to the excessive
development of air-bubbles in the hair shaft. Popular belief brings the
premature and especially the sudden whitening into connection with
depressing mental emotions. We might quote the German
expression--"Sich graue Haare etwas wachsen lassen" ("To worry one's
self gray"). Brown-Sequard observed on several occasions in his own
dark beard hairs which had turned white in a night and which he
epileptoid. He closes his brief communication on the subject with the
belief that it is quite possible for black hair to turn white in one
night or even in