is irresistible; if less than ten per cent.
require a handle to their hair-brushes, more
than ninety per cent. ought to use the Sine
Manubrium.

We are half inclined to wish that
English houses had waxed parquetry
floors instead of carpets, that we might
appreciate M. Dufour's kindness in
inventing the Brosse Mécanique, for
rubbing and polishing such floors. We know
little about the matter in England, but, in
France these waxed floors are very general.
Until now, M. Dufour tells us, "Les ouvriers
cireurs d'appartements,"—or we may as well
give it at once in M. Dufour's English, which
is not a bad specimen of the curious English
produced by French manufacturers in some
of their advertisements:—"Hitherto, as any
one may know, the men entrusted with the
care of rubbing the apartments, were obliged
to make use of brushes tied to their feet, a
very defectuous system as well for the fatigue
which they are to undergo, as for the deplorable
effects which it produces; this system
is especially most dangerous for the feminine
sex, and it ought to be observed that those
who have been obliged to make use of these
tied brushes, at a certain age can no more
practise that kind of work. Sensible of these
difficulties, and the dreadful consequences
which result from the imperfections of the
usual brush, the inventor of the mechanic
brush arrived at a double end: at first, from
a motive of humanity, in finding out the
production of a less toilsome instrument, and the
effects of which might be less hurtful, that is
to say, an instrument of progress, with which
we might obtain a better effect on account of
the new conditions of its construction." In
that last sentence M. Dufour has contrived to
render himself tolerably unintelligible; but
from the French description, the Brosse
Mécanique, seems to be a kind of framework
into which the bristles are fixed at the
bottom, and which is worked by the strength
of the arms instead of the shuttling movement
of the feet; there is an apparatus
within the frame-work for enabling the user
to adjust and re-arrange the bristles as their
ends wear away. We are quite willing to
believe, therefore, that the Brosse Mécanique
is a useful improvement.

This brush question may be said, figuratively
and literally, to bristle up before us in greater
importance than most persons would imagine.
What with the wax-ends for our Crispins,
and the materials for our brush-makers,
the demand for bristles is quite
enormous. Only think of our importing more
than two million pounds of bristles every
year, irrespective of those which grow on the
backs of true-born British hogs! Why it is
that a hog's bristle is more useful for such
purposes than the hair of horse, ox, or sheep,
a microscopic examination would possibly
reveal; but of the fact itself there can
be no doubt. Those countries which rear
most hogs and make fewest brushes, can sell
most bristles to their neighbours. Russia is
such a country. Barren as the region is, it
has immense forests of those trees in which, or
I rather under which, hogs delight to pick up a
living. There are large establishments, too,
in which oxen are slaughtered for the sake of
their hides and tallow; and there are nice
pickings in such places for the porcine tribe
—the hog being a sort of optimist, finding
good in everything. The good feeding not
merely renders the hog fat, but the fatness
renders his bristles susceptible of easy extraction.
The bristle harvest is no small affair.
Like the hair-harvest in France, which
we lately had occasion to dilate upon, it is a
grand time when the agents come round to
collect the crop. What sort of prices the
agents give, is a mystery we are unable
to solve; but the bristles are conveyed by
these agents to the great fairs held periodically
in Russia: and at these fairs merchants
from St. Petersburg and Odessa make their
purchases. The cropping, and transporting,
and selling, are so managed that, if possible,
the cargoes shall be shipped off for foreign
export before the Baltic and the Black Sea
become frozen over. The bristles, varying
from three or four to nine or ten inches in
length, vary much in quality; the white are
better than the yellow, the yellow better
than the black; the wiry are better than the
limp; and the moderately long are better
than the very long. The bristles are tied
into bundles, and the bundles are packed into
casks containing four or five hundred pounds
weight each. Our brush-makers are
sometimes indebted to Westphalia, whose hogs
can afford bristles as well as hams; and
sometimes to Austria, whose forests afford
abundant hog-meat; and sometimes to
France and Belgium, which supply bristles in
limited quantity and fine quality; but Russia
is the great source of supply.

Russian and Polish hogs are not more
cleanly than other hogs. Their bristles
are dirty and piggish, and require much
cleansing. First of all, in preparing them
for the market, they are assorted into
colours and qualities—the blacks, the greys,
the yellows, the whites, and the lilies; and
then they receive a thorough good dressing.
The root-ends are carefully kept together;
the long are separated from the short, and
the bristles are combed and combed and
combed again with a kind of wool-comber's
implement, until they become as sleek as
may be. And then, if special fancy work
be looming in the distance, the dressed
hairs are further subjected to the process of
picking, which is often children's work, and
which consists in picking out of the bundle
every individual hair which differs in tint
from the general mass. A yet more
determined search for cleanliness leads to the
scouring of the bristles, which renders them
not merely clean, but much whitened in colour.