Initiative in Evolution

In the products of Nature there are no freaks, or impish tricks performed, and it is not for nothing she does her work. Every one of them asks for and should receive an explana­tion consistent with fact and reason, and here comes in the need for studying, as one may, the broad outlines of man’s ancestry. His ancestor being now sought in an earlier and more generalized stock than that of the four genera of anthropoid apes known to us, the most instructive and safest line to take is to trace him back to the stock lemur, who remains to-day among the most Chinese or unchanging of known mammals. In his illuminating work, Prehistoric Man and History, Professor Scott Elliott adopts an excellent term, “lemur-monkey-man,” to sum up, without missing links, the long ancestry of man. I take the liberty of adapting this term more closely to the present inquiry and use that of lemur-ape-man instead, for whatever may be the relation of man to present apes some ape-like ancestors enter into his genealogical tree.45 For my purpose the monkey is less useful because his hair-slope differs so little from that of lemurs, whereas apes have made for themselves a very remarkable position as regards the hair of their forearms. Our series of animals for study is then well represented by the lemur-ape-man—hypothetical, necessary and serviceable. Through all the immense stretch of time occupied in this process of descent there has been ample opportunity for the lemur to change his fashion to that of the ape, and the latter to change to the present fashion of man.

This simple arrangement of the lemur’s hair is common to that of all the more primitive long-bodied mammals, of which an otter is a good example, and I venture, greatly daring, to call this the normal slope of hair. Somewhere and somehow in the human tree there has appeared a total reversal of the lemur-type; the stock of apes acquired a new fashion, and gradually discarded altogether their ancient inheritance, beginning their innova­tion perhaps, with Dryopithecus fontani in the Miocene Age.

The Dynamics of Hair-Pattern.

There are a few well-known facts which it is necessary to bear in mind if one is endeavouring to understand the mode of origin and order of the events before us. The hairy coat of a mammal is composed of individual hairs of varying length, colour and thickness, each being rooted in a tiny pit in the skin and growing from a papilla at its base. As the hair grows, its free end is pushed away from the papilla at the rate of one inch in two months. This is the rate in man’s hair, and it is probably greater in the case of lower mammals on account of the greater importance and physiological activity of their hairy coat than in man’s. But one inch in two months is a close enough calcula­tion. Here, then, is a structure which grows throughout the whole life of the animal, and has to dispose itself somehow on the surface of the skin. It does this in the line of least resistance, and to trace this line is the Alpha and Omega of the present inquiry.

There is a concep­tion of much value in understanding the dynamics of the distribu­tion of hair, and that is to view the hair of mammals as composed of certain streams. As in every illustra­tion, this concep­tion may be challenged because of some difference the critic may find between these streams and a stream of fluid. It certainly does not leave its bed as do the component parts of a river, a glacier or molten lava, for the base of the hair is fixed. But it will serve, and is at least not more open to objection than certain useful metaphors in biology as when the genealogy of man and animals is pictured as a tree, or the living things of the earth as a “web of life.” It is, then, as streams moving at the rate of one inch in two months in the lines of least resistance that I propose to discuss the animal hair and its diverse patterns and offer no further apology for doing so. Just as in the cases of a stream of water with varying banks and rocks in its course, or a glacier with its mountain-sides and sinuous valleys, or a stream of lava with small projecting surfaces of a mountain, our stream of hair flows on, hindered only by adequate obstructions.

Yet another concep­tion from the region of metaphor must be mentioned. It is one which will commend itself to every mind which has been steeped in thoughts of warfare for five years. We are all soldiers now; we think in terms of military affairs. In the case of our hair-streams there are in many regions two forces directly opposed to one another, others in which no struggle has yet occurred, as, in the Great War, Italy was not at one period at open war with Germany.

Between the opposing forces in our small battle-field of the hairy coat there have been waged battles to which those of Mukden, Verdun, the Somme and Arras, are not to be compared in point of time. They are but as one day to a thousand years. On one side of the conflict in our present chosen field the ancient primitive type of the lemur has remained entrenched for some millions of years, until there arose new forces in its descendants on the other side and this changed the war of positions into one of movement. It was indeed “a contemptible little army” which came forward to oppose the ancient barbarian forces of the lemur, long prepared and organised, and these new armies fought under the banner, Habit. In the slowly-formed patterns in many types of mammals we have records of the treaties made after these long struggles and the rectifications of frontier which became necessary. The critic may call these “battles of kites and crows,” and ask What war correspondents were allowed to describe them; but a battle, whether great or small, long or short, is important to the parties concerned, and it is open to us to “reconstruct” the facts of the battle as do the historians on their part, for example, Sir James Ramsay the battle of Agincourt—with tolerable verisimilitude. But in science, especially geological science, the process of reconstruc­tion is much more ambitious and bold than any that is here attempted. Who has not been fascinated, if he has read Sir E. Ray Lankester’s work on Extinct Animals, by the skill and daring with which he conveys to us a vivid idea of the form and mode of life, with scanty data, of the extinct Moa of New Zealand, the great Pterodactyle, Pteranodon, or the Diprotodon of Owen—“the probable appearance in life” of these uncanny but very real inhabitants of the earth in days long past. How skilfully did Owen from a piece of bone seven inches long, sent to him by a gentleman in New Zealand sixty years ago, pronounce it to be a part of the thigh-bone of a bird like an ostrich, and then after a few years had passed, confirmed it by more bones of the skeleton, till the large Moa, extinguished 600 or 700 years ago by the Maoris, lived again before us—an historical personage; or how by the examina­tion of the skull and most of its skeleton the giant marsupial from Australia, Diprotodon, was resuscitated and admired; or again, how from the bones of the arms, shoulder-girdle and fingers was built up the strange body of Pteranodon, the great flying dragon. All of which is the legitimate and approved business of biologists and palæontologists, and this digression is made here to show that my line of treatment of a little subject agrees with that in a greater one; nay, it even proceeds in its explanations of events on the ever valuable principle of Lyell in a still greater one without which to-day geology would be a thing of naught, that is, the principle of explaining changes in the surface of the earth by reference to causes now in action. The objection that one subject is very great and the other very small is not valid; for one as much as the other there are millions of years to be had for the asking. Who in these days hesitates to talk and try to think in millions?—tens of millions of men, millions of soldiers, millions upon millions of money, millions of bacteria in vaccines and millions of money belonging to other people disposed of by the new spendthrift Minister?

From Lemur to Ape.

Returning now to our Eocene lemur we must remind ourselves of the problem before his simple mind and those of his Simian descendants. How was he to change so greatly the direction of the hair on his forearm (Fig. 1) till it should turn right about face and imitate those great German “victories” of Hindenburg, well called Marshal Rückwarts? The problem lies open in the Figure and receiving no aid from Selection or survival of the fittest, in this little effort, he had to fall back on the eternal and tedious force of habit and use. I am afraid if here I were interrupted by some critic, more learned than wise, by a summary demand on the part of Selection for its share in the result, I should be tempted to reply with the word Φλυαρια employed by George Borrow, forbearing to give the transla­tion of the reply as he gives it. Anyhow, it is a case in which to “listen politely and change the subject.”

Here comes in the aspect of strife between primitive and new obstructing forces in a little hair-stream. The lemur lives in trees and carries on a stealthy nocturnal business, moving on all fours in quest of his daily bread, and no external force or new habit avails to modify the hair-slope on his forearms, and so it remains until some primitive form of monkey, gradually evolving into a primitive ape, brings into the family new habits and customs. Other men and other manners appear in the Miocene Age. Our supposed Dryopithecus fontani becomes more upright in his bodily, and perhaps his moral habits, and spends an increasing amount of his leisure time in the sitting posture; his hands are frequently grasping a bough as he sits and reflects, it may be in a man-ward direction, or, as is more likely, on his last meal of nuts and fruits. But he did not spend quite so much time as Wallace and others think in this futile attitude, for he knew in his way as much as the modern bachelor does, of making his posture comfortable and restful when he was not out at work, and he varied his plans by resting his forearms on his thigh, crouched up and cosy, and doubtless slept much in this attitude. All these bold departures from his lemur-ancestor’s habits had the necessary result of altering the slope of his hair on the forearms, which was now growing as long and coarse as we see it to-day in the orang. In course of milleniums the ancient forces yielded to those of the new armies, and the once normal slope became reversed in a way which shocked the conservative lemurs of his day. It requires little imagina­tion to see how the lengthening thickening hairs on this limb-segment became changed in their direction by friction against the opposing surfaces of the thighs, by gravita­tion, and the frequent dripping of rain when they were held up to grasp a bough. Here then we see at work new forces of friction, pressure, gravita­tion and dripping of rain, turning endlessly and slowly the lemur-fashion into the ape-fashion, with unlimited time for their effectual action. In this stock of Man’s ancestry Selection was taking care of the individual and Habit of the details of his making—two truly harmonious partners.

From Ape to Man.

Another step, and a long one, has still to be taken from the ape-fashion to that of man. Bearing in mind that the lemur-fashion has been totally reversed by the ape it startles one to find that man in his modern fashion has largely reverted to that of the lemur on the front and sides of his forearm. This is clearly shown in Figure 1. There also you see graphically recorded in the hair of the extensor border of the ulna, a little backward streak, a poor little legacy of fifty pounds from the fortunes of many thousands once possessed by the ape. From the present limited point of view, man is a veritable pauper, and his possessions in this limb-segment may with some irony well be called a “vestige.”

Professor Scott-Elliott in his book, Prehistoric Man and His Story, p. 60, goes rather wide of the mark here in his graphic picture of our rude ancestor and his hard life. He gives too strongly the idea of him sitting asleep in raging gales, in driving rain which is neatly conducted by the thatch of his hair off his skin. As far as it goes this need not be questioned, as a matter of probability, but he states far too broadly “The hair on the arm, even of those civilised men who retain sufficient to trace the arrangement, turns down both upper and forearm to the elbow”46—true as to the upper arm, but only true of the forearm in a very narrow streak of hair over the extensor surface of the ulna. The fact is that in every human being, not too old, its course can be traced with a lens. He overlooks also from this protective point of view the fact that the ape or early man, in the position of rest he describes, would have very much the reverse of protec­tion from the “lie” of the hair on his thighs, for this is towards the knee and is well calculated to catch the rain and conduct it carefully, or let it run, into his groins. So the protec­tion theory (under the empire of Selection) is again in straits. But I must not forget my self-denying ordinance alluded to in the Preface, but will show how the ape fashion began to be modified into its present and probably final form in man. Still further changes in the simple habits of the earliest men became frequent, and fresh forces were organised in our mimic battlefield. Gravita­tion gradually ceased to act as the hairs became thinner and shorter. Friction and pressure changed their lines of incidence with the increasing tendency of man to assume the upright posture, for the surfaces exposed to pressure and friction were only affected when the extensor surface or back of the forearm rested on some supporting object, an attitude extremely common in man as we know him now. Then came the opportunity of the primitive barbarian host, the lemur fashion, by a prolonged counter-attack to recover on the greater part of the forearm the ground lost millions of years before by the ape, and then was engraved on the forearm of man the permanent treaty which we have before us to-day.

This small and apparently trivial battle-ground has been described at what may seem undue length, but it is a miniature of the rise and fall of little empires such as here engage our attention, and I make no apology for this to the reader who has gone thus far with me, for, on the principle of ex uno disce omnes, all that follows in other areas of the hairy coat of mammals will be the clearer, and little repeti­tion will be needed.

CHAPTER VII.
THE EVOLUTION OF PATTERNS OF HAIR.

Some attention must here be given to the supposed mode of formation of individual patterns of hair, that is to say, their evolution. So here one has to move among the fields of hypothesis, without which detached facts of nature are useless to science.

The simplest pattern consists of a reversed area of hair appearing between two adjoining streams; the more complex are whorls, featherings and crests. No detailed descrip­tion nor illustra­tion of the former are required, but I have prepared a diagram to illustrate the latter (see p. 51.) (A) shows a whorl by itself; (B) a whorl, feathering and crest. The arrows at the sides indicate the direction of the adjoining hair-streams, the arrow in the centre of (B) the direction of the reversed flow of hair.

This hypothetical treatment, with addition of some metaphors, does not carry us far enough to leave it thus to the tender mercy of that class of critic who relies too much on the “argument from ignorance.” He tells us such a process as I have pictured may be true or not, and that no one can do more than leave the case open, and treat it like that of Jarndyce & Jarndyce where it would remain in Chancery till all of us concerned in the inquiry have returned to our dust. The critic might reasonably ask for experiments which will bear out the suggested views. But verifica­tion by calculated experiments is impossible, for, ex hypothesi, the variations or patterns which are described require long periods of time for their produc­tion. Such experiments being ruled out, the evidence in favour of the hypothesis must be sought in some region of the hairy coat of mammals where whorls, featherings and crests can be observed in all stages of their formation.

The Side of the Horse’s Neck.

The field chosen for observa­tion is, from one point of view, the most remarkable among all the numerous regions in the great series of hair-clad mammals. The side of the neck in the domestic horse displays all degrees and forms of whorls, featherings and crests in such variety as to be almost bewildering. I must have examined many thousands of specimens of this valuable large mammal in reference to this state of things on the side of its neck, and can only regret that I have not kept any record of them as to number or quality, and I fear the opportunity for doing so will not return in this country. There are three reasons for this choice of field. In the first place there is or was an extensive supply of the specimens for examina­tion; in the second, the side of a horse’s neck is a region where no extraneous or artificial agents, such as harness, except a bridle, can operate, and therefore Nature and the animal’s habits have free play; in the third the neck of a horse in its locomotive life is subject to powerful mechanical forces which are constant, literally speaking, while it walks, trots, canters or gallops. Here then, if anywhere, one may read the records, in indelible characters of hair patterns, the history of its active life and that of its ancestors, and here also one may reasonably expect to find these patterns in every possible stage of formation, from a mere rudiment to the most finished product in a whorl, feathering and crest—and this is precisely what is found to exist.

Even an observer not acquainted with the anatomy of this region who watches closely a horse in action cannot fail to notice how at every step taken there is a marked jolt of the neck produced in the neck by the impact of its hoofs with the ground and in supporting its heavy skull. I have computed several times the number of jolts that the neck of a trotting horse sustains, in my numerous rides behind various horses, during many hundreds of miles, and have reckoned the number which occur in a horse trotting for an hour, at the usual rate at which a doctor travels. This is on the average 6,000, and of course the numbers of jolts in walking, cantering, and galloping vary according to these different paces. But a great deal more of movement of the head and neck is observed beside the jolt at every step. See how the animal tosses up its head, twists it to this and that side for the mere joie de vivre when it is fresh, or, even when hindered by blinkers,47 how he turns his head to look at every passing object in the road with his ancestral caution, how he will pass contemptuously a great horse-waggon or even now a villainous-looking motor lorry, but will peer at a beggar woman sitting beside the road, or a heap of stones, or a yapping cur! All this vivid muscular work of a horse’s head and neck hardly ceases while he is in action and at any rate not till he is dead beat, and the higher the courage and breeding of the horse the more frequent and brisk are his movements. Is it possible to conceive a region of the body of any large mammal where more numerous, varied, and powerful action of underlying muscles can be found playing their ceaseless tricks on the sober normal slope of hair in the skin which covers them? If there be any region approaching this I have not found it.

There are here indeed great forces for conflict—first a layer of strong superficial muscles, second a layer of smaller muscles which has not been figured, third a deep layer of muscles, and fourth a powerful, widely-spread and strongly-attached mass of dense elastic tissue, adapted for supporting the head without muscular exertion, but by its elasticity allowing a downward jerk of the head and neck at every step. It is an exceedingly important structure for a domestic horse.

The Normal Arrangement of Hair.

So much for the active part played by a horse’s neck and head, and for the simpler anatomical facts of the region involved. Before proceeding to describe the results of these as seen in the hair, it is well to make sure of a point which a critic might raise. “How do you know,” says he, “that some of the variations in this highly variable region of the hair are not normal. What is the normal type here?” A very easy answer to this is found by studying, not only any Ungulate known, except the Gnu, but more particularly all wild Equidæ; and this reveals the fact that in all this series the normal slope of hair prevails here, that is to say, an even trend from head to shoulder. Variations in others, indeed, hardly exist, and I may add that the absence of variations here is a strong piece of negative evidence in my favour, for no Ungulate comes near the domestic horse for amount and activity of locomo­tion, which is indeed his raison d’être. He is the only one that has invented new patterns. But a little direct evidence can be brought which clinches this argument from inference based on ancestry. I made an examina­tion, at the stables of Messrs. Tilling, at Peckham, of 100 consecutive specimens of hackney, for the purpose of ascertaining the propor­tion in that group of those that showed the normal slope on the neck to those with variations. In 62 of these the normal existed on both sides of the neck, 18 Normal on one side, and in the remaining 20 there were variations on both sides. If 100 specimens of horses contain 80 with one side and 62 with both normal the previous inference requires no further support.

Fourteen Varieties.

I have put together here, and described, fourteen out of a much larger number of the most instructive varieties of pattern that I have been able to collect during the course of many years and examina­tion of several thousand horses. They comprise examples the mostly likely, as I think, to convey to the reader an adequate picture of the results of the strength, number and variety of mechanical forces in our present battle-field of hair. The diagrams almost speak for themselves, but a short written descrip­tion will help to emphasise the salient points.

There are pictured here the normal type, divergent hair-streams partially reversed, simple whorls in different regions, a whorl and feathering, whorls, featherings and crests, and these in several areas. It is a veritable portrait gallery in which is portrayed the earliest and latest stages of this family of fashions in hair on the horse’s neck. They are grouped mostly in pairs.

Fig. 8 shows the way in which two streams of hair close up to the ears begin to diverge. Fig. 9 a similar divergence towards the base of the neck.

Fig. 12 presents a stream of hair still more twisted from its course than that of Fig. 10, and Fig. 13 a whorl going on to a feathering which loses itself, without coming to an abrupt stop in a crest which is the more usual course.

I have little to add to the graphic evidence afforded by these pictures, each of which I observed noted and sketched as the bearers of them came before me during many years of a “Captain-Cuttle-like” disposal of some of my leisure. No clearer proof can be desired of the view here advanced, that habit or habitual muscular action, and jolting, is the cause of the varied patterns in this field, and that according to the Law of Parcimony no other is required, this canon of Occam being expressed more succinctly—Neither more, nor more onerous causes are to be assumed than are necessary to account for the phenomena.

CHAPTER VIII.
CAN MUSCULAR ACTION CHANGE THE DIRECTION OF HAIR IN THE INDIVIDUAL?

It might seem unnecessary to most persons who are good enough to follow this inquiry that the question asked above should receive an explicit answer. We all know, of course, how a man’s hair is said to stand on end in excessive states of horror or rage, and how a short-haired terrier’s back bristles at the sight of certain foes. But it is not so simple a matter to show that the direction of the hair is permanently changed. I submit that the persons I mention are right in their opinion for this work contains evidence throughout that muscular action beneath the skin is the efficient cause in many regions of the formation of hair patterns. But like Kirkpatrick when Bruce struck down the Red Comyn we had best “make sicker,” and give as much evidence of the affirmative question as any critic can demand.

Hairs of Human Eyebrows.

As in the previous chapter I chose an open and plain field for the evidence bearing on the formation of whorls and the like, so here I turn to one still more clear for him who runs to read. In these days old men are of less account than in earlier and simpler times, but I claim to have found “a new use for old men” as I had almost thought of calling this chapter. In this somewhat neglected group we have an almost unlimited number of specimens for examina­tion, and in their eyebrows they furnish a valuable field for tracing some striking results of underlying muscular traction.

Darwin made one of his few mistakes when he included among rudimentary and inherited structures48 those few long hairs which are often seen in the eyebrows of man, looking upon them as representatives of those found in some species of macacus and the chimpanzee. That great and modest man was, I am sure, not in the habit of making much use of the looking-glass—not more than women who, as we know, rarely do such a thing. But if he did he would have observed in his own splendid frontal region and brows excellent examples of the phenomena which form the subject of this chapter. This I know, though I never saw him in the flesh, for it so happens that in the great volume published in the jubilee of The Origin, and called Darwin and Modern Science, two good photographs of him, at the ages of thirty-five and about seventy-one are reproduced. These both show, but the later one much more clearly, good examples of these long and not very ornamental aberrant hairs. Thirty-five years of arduous thought and work had told their tale on him and twisted from their normal paths the lengthening thickening hairs of his eyebrows.

Also, if he had looked a little beyond the eyebrows he would have seen some very deep wrinkles of the skin on his forehead and round his orbits. It is these two groups of facts, wrinkles and twisted, changed hairs of man’s eyebrows, which give the answer to the question “Can muscular action change the direction of hair in the individual?”

In 1903 I drew the attention of the Anatomical Society of Great Britain and Ireland to these two groups of facts under the title “Notes on the Eyebrows of Man,” and presented some large drawings of individual elderly men of my acquaintance, and the present chapter is only an extension of that little piece of work.

No area of the mammalian skin is so useful and easy to follow as this in answering the present question, for though the previous chapter supplied part of the answer in a very fruitful field, the proof still remained one of “tremendous probability” and not more. But in the frontal and superciliary region of man there is complete proof of the truth of the affirmative answer, as I shall show.

Here again we must encounter our old friend the normal slope of hair. As I stated in 1903, “The normal arrangement of the hair on the eyebrows of a moderately hairy subject is as follows: in the middle line the hairs of the two sides tend to meet and form a somewhat confused group of hairs; passing away from the middle line the hairs assume a nearly sagittal direction, then become more sloped away, and a sharp change in the direction of the frontal and orbital streams brings the remaining hairs into that regular accurate arrangement of a united stream so characteristic of a hairy subject, and this passes along the superciliary ridge to the external angular process”—all of which can be seen at a glance by any one who looks closely enough, as with the eyes of a lover, for example, at the brows of a dark-haired maid or youth. In the young these hairs lie close to the skin, and with that very interesting group of persons we have no more to do here, except for one piece of practical advice to them which they will find at the end of the present chapter.

Evidence from Artists.

More than one kind of evidence may be brought forward in this case, and I propose to “put in” a certain class of witness that not the most acute cross-examining counsel, Daniel O’Connell, Hawkins, or even Sergeant Buzfuz, can shake. I pity that young man or woman to-day who has not mended several holes in his education by reading the books of Dickens and Lever in editions illustrated by the immortal Phiz. If I do no more for him by this passage than induce him to mend such holes I shall have been of some use to his mind. For my part I look upon Phiz as far superior to Hogarth or Cruikshank in the fidelity to nature of his drawings of the faces of his numerous characters, especially the old men. Look through Dombey & Son, Bleak House, Pickwick Papers, Barnaby Rudge, Tom Burke, Jack Hinton, Harry Lorrequer, The O’Donohue, and, perhaps best of all for the illustrations, The Knight of Gwynne. Examine, with a lens if necessary, the delicate way in which Phiz shows the projecting hairs on the eyebrows of his many elderly men, and note at the same time the truth to scientific fact which he shows in his female characters, for only in the drawings of “Mrs. Gamp proposes a toast” and of Mrs. Pipchin in “Paul and Mrs. Pipchin,” and one or two doubtful instances, can I find that he represents even his elderly women with this feature of their eyebrow hairs. But see Captain Cuttle and Mr. Bunsby in “Solemn references to Mrs. Bunsby,” both with strongly-marked shelves of hair sticking out from the brows, Captain Cuttle in “The shadow in the little parlour,” one of the fat coachmen in “Mr. Weller and his friends drinking to Mr. Pell”—the sharp brush projecting from the brow of Bagnet in “Mr. Smallweed breaks the pipe of peace,” that of Vholes in “Attorney and Client, fortitude and impatience”—(the equally remarkable absence of this feature in Pecksniff, Chadband and Skimpole, men without character or feeling)—Gashford in “Lord George Gordon,” the fat figure in “The Gallant Vintner,” Pioche in “Minette in attendance on Pioche,” the courtier in “Louis XIV. and de Genchy,” “The death of Shaun,” the blind man in “Joe the mighty hunter,” the right hand figure in “Mr. O’Leary creating a sensation,” Sir Archibald Mc’Nab in “A fireside group,” “Roade’s return to O’Donoughue Castle,” Sandy Mc’Grane and Old Hickman in “Sandy expedites the doctor,” Daly in “Daly bestows a helmet on Bully Dodd,” the knight in “The Knight is taken Prisoner.”

Another witness to the scientific facts of the frequent presence of these hairs on the eyebrows of elderly men, and the rarity of them in those of women, is the dear friend of our youth, our friend even to hoar hairs, the Book of Nonsense, by Edward Lear. Here in 110 vivid drawings of several hundred characters, each of them sketched with a few bold strokes, is inscribed again and again this peculiar feature. Look at the “Old man with a nose,” the “Old Man of th’Abruzzi,” the “Old man of Melrose,” the “Old man of Calcutta,” the “Old Person of Anerley,” the “Old Person of Chester,” all with strange and striking bushes of long hairs standing out from their brows. Again see how hardly one of the female characters shows a trace of it even in that most truculent “Grandmother of the Young Person of Smyrna” who threatened to burn her, though her vertical wrinkles are formidable, or in the remarkable face of the wife of the “Old Man of Peru.” The “Old Lady of Prague” shows it in a moderate degree. Support of this kind may be trivial, and so will the opposing counsel say is that of a burglar’s finger-prints, but, quâ evidence, it is as strong as that which commits the criminal to a prison on this modern proof. No one can suppose that Phiz and Lear fifty or sixty years ago had a prophetic and treacherous insight into the harmless labours of a man in the year 1920 who would exploit their labours to the advantage of his hypothesis, and that they faked their caricatures for such a purpose. This is the only alternative line for Sergeant Buzfuz to take unless he acknowledge the facts to be facts, and betake himself to abuse of the plaintiff’s attorney.

Eyebrows Interpreted by Wrinkles.

When one comes to the interpreta­tion of the curious shapes taken by these hairs one is not left to inference, for Nature has put some indelible stamps on the forehead and round the orbits of the men examined. These are wrinkles which have been long in prepara­tion and only begin to show themselves fully when the “evil days” have come, in the ’fifties, ’sixties and ’seventies.

I will describe the wrinkles first, and then their results, with examples, in the numerous fashions of the hairs. Wrinkles are of two kinds, pathological and physiological, in other words the former are the results of degenera­tion and wasting of the subcutaneous fat and loss of its normal elasticity, and are found in the faces of nearly all men and women, with advancing age, and they are the subject of much distress in the fair sex and a good deal of “beauty doctoring.” The latter are the result of long-continued and repeated action of certain small muscles. The former are numerous, shallow and fine, the latter few and comparatively deep. The difference between elderly women and men in respect of the projecting hairs is not that men have many more physiological wrinkles, but that the hairs of women in this region do not stiffen and grow long nearly so much as those of men.

There are three groups of wrinkles found on the human forehead and face, vertical, arched or horizontal and orbital. This division of wrinkles is a natural one, for each group is produced by the action of different muscles, the vertical by the corrugator muscle, which is a narrow band passing from under the frontalis muscle inwards, where it is attached to the bone between the two eyebrows; the arched by the action of the frontalis muscle, one which moves the scalp and in doing so elevates the eyebrows; the orbital by the elliptic orbicularis muscle which closes the eyelids. These muscles are shown in Fig. 20.

Vertical wrinkles are found in the central region of the forehead and sometimes occupy the middle line with a deep furrow, more often they are bilateral and symmetrical, near the inner fourth part of the eyebrow, and sometimes they are placed at different distances from the middle line.

Arched wrinkles extend over the forehead in a series of lines which are usually concentric with the curve of the eyebrows, but are sometimes nearly horizontal.

Orbital wrinkles may lie in a radiating plan all round the outer lower and inner borders of the orbit, and in some persons they are found lying over the curves of the orbicularis muscle itself.

Some Examples.

The variations in the long hairs of men’s eyebrows present some very singular tufts, and I have added below nine figures of certain cases examined and noted by myself, and these are, I hope, plain enough without any more detailed account than is given in the few words describing each.

Unless one’s attention be specially directed to these aberrant hairs, which are extremely common, one would not expect that hairs could be so variously twisted by muscular action beneath them. You may see a tuft of long hair projecting from the plane of the eyebrows towards the inner end, looking like a small horn, and I have measured individual hairs in elderly persons and found many an inch in length and a few an inch and a half. Such a tuft gives a fierce look to the countenance if the hairs are bushy and plentiful. The celebrated Dr. Keate, the flogging Head of Eton, a fiery strenuous person, was noted for the extraordinary long horn of thick hair in his eyebrows, which he appeared to use as a supplementary finger to point to this or that object of his terrifying attention. You may also see a man with a great drooping curtain of hairs overhanging his eyes, half hiding the upper lids and eyes. Another will show at the outer end of the eyebrows a bristling bush of hairs turning upwards in the aggressive manner of Wilhelm II. of evil memory, or of Mr. Roosevelt in former times. Again the outer points of the eyebrow hairs may turn downwards like a cavalry moustache, or the hairs may stand out at right angles as a level shelf. The fashions of these “orbital moustaches” appear to be as numerous as those of the upper lip.

A Conflict of Forces.

If the eyebrows are studied in the light of the three muscles displayed in Fig. 20 it is seen to contain an interesting congeries of small forces in conflict. (1) The frontalis moves the eyebrow directly upwards. I had a friend once about seventy years old who was a very vigorous, strong-willed man and he spoke with decision and energy. It was most interesting to watch how his frontalis muscle strongly and frequently contracted as he spoke and drew up his eyebrows so that one might, as it were, measure the strength of his expressed convictions by the rate of action of his frontalis muscle! (2) The corrugator draws the skin of the eyebrow inwards to the middle line thus acting at a right angle to the line of the frontalis. (3) The orbicularis in the upper part directly opposes the action of the frontalis and in the lower acts “on its own” in closing the lower lid. This little spot is a Hill 60, destroyed at the battle of Messines, and has been the scene of much fighting throughout life, and it bears abiding witness in the twists and curves of the long hairs to the severity of the struggles. These actions of the three contending muscles are involuntary and of a reflex character, and much employed in such habits as those of knitting the brows or in elevating or depressing them, all this being set going and controlled by cerebral action. Incidentally then the preponderance of one or more of these actions over others, as shown in the hair, is evidence, as far as it goes, of the disposi­tion and character of the possessor. So that between the wrinkles and the twisted hairs of his brow the elderly man, and less so the woman, carries about an engraved statement, for his friends or enemies to read, of his natural disposi­tion and his acquired habits, in a limited field—his written character!