Consider Her Ways by Frederick Philip Grove

First of all, then, both Bissa-tee and myself verified the remarkable fact that man moults at will, seasonally as well as diurnally. This gift seems at first sight to place him apart from all the rest of nature as one of the luckiest of all created beings. Yet, when we reflect what pangs, let me say, a grasshopper has to endure in order to change his coat three or four times in his life, we may well hesitate in pronouncing him blessed in this fact. We shall soon see that, though man moults at will and is able to adapt himself to all changes of the weather, there is good reason to infer that he does not do so without suffering and pain.

Unfortunately we had, in the earlier part of our stay among men, small opportunity to observe man in his more intimate private life. The nearest we came to such observations was on our last trip in the great space-machine which took us south; for this space-machine was provided with special chambers to which the human passengers retired at night for the purpose of resting. There, then, we saw this curious mammal in a state least protected against the vicissitudes of the climate. The integuments which he wore in daytime were discarded and others were donned, of a kind which would serve but poorly to keep out the cold and to shed rain, sleet, or snow. The process of change from one set to another, which we had a good chance to observe, was essentially similar to that by which a grasshopper moults: man crawled out of the integument to be discarded, often using his limbs to push it forward while he withdrew. When every one of the successive integuments was removed, the body was found to be covered only by a soft membranaceous skin of a porous texture with a sprinkling of hair here and there and a few chitinous plates distributed over the extremities of his limbs. The hair was rudimentary; not one of them retaining even a trace of the power to serve as a sensilla. The chitinous plates were found exclusively on the upper surfaces of the toes of both fore- and hind-limbs where they serve as a protection to the most sensitive nerve-endings of these members. This, too, is curious in the extreme. For of what use can these sensitive nerve-endings be when they are covered with an insensitive armour? That they are there, was conclusively shown when a man's extreme toe-tips were caught between the frame and the movable part of a heavy door: this man gave evidence of pain by using frightful language, calling upon his god and that god's counterpart to bear him witness that the door had wronged him.