Hairspring

“ Hair, wool, fur, &c., form quite an extraneous appendage to the skin, or body producing them, not at all directly dependent on the life of the animal for their own existence, for they have been known to live and grow for some time after the death of the animal itself. We also know that they live, grow, and die, showing all the signs of youth, maturity, and old age. Hair possesses no sensation at any period of its existence ”

“ Hence, if a partial loss of hair was esteemed ornamental by our ape-like progenitors, sexual selection, operating age after age, might result in relative nakedness. “The faces of several species of monkey and large surfaces at the posterior end of the body have been denuded of hair; and this we may safely attribute to sexual selection.” The beard of the male, and the great length of the hair of the head in some races, especially seem due to this cause. ”

“ In creatures with vibrissæ, however, and in those quadrupeds whose whiskers are tactile organs, it can hardly be doubted that the feeling is projected out of the root into the shaft of the hair itself. We ourselves have an approach to this when the beard as a whole, or the hair as a whole, is touched. ”

“ As the male anthropoid apes chose the females with the least hair, and the females favoured the males with the finest growths on chin and head, the general coating of the body gradually degenerated, and the hair of the beard and head was more strongly developed. ”

“ If the hair is allowed to go with the wind and it passes over an empty nest, or a bird takes it to its nest, the head from which it came will ache.
No person should cut his own hair, as he will by doing so become an unlucky person to meet. ”

“ Of course Mammy Susan had done her best all my life to keep me from letting birds get any of my hair for nests, [249] as it is supposed to be the very worst luck that can befall one, and terrible headaches are sure to be the lot of a person whose hair helps make a nest. Nevertheless, I had always sneaked my hair to the birds at Bracken, and this morning, feeling sure that I was the only person astir, I had quite openly brought a wad of hair, Dum's burnished black, Dee's blue black, and my curly brown, all mingled together. ”

“ That the hair is chiefly retained in the male sex on the chest and face,170 and in both sexes at the junction of all four limbs with the trunk, favors this inference—on the assumption that the hair was lost before man became erect; for the parts which now retain most hair would then have been most protected from the heat of the sun. The crown of the head, however, offers a curious exception, for at all times it must have been one of the most exposed parts, yet it is thickly clothed with hair. ”

“ On the sides of the body the hairs are coloured in the same way, excepting that the white portion is more extended, and is followed by a rich yellow-brown, shaded into black as it approaches the apex of each hair. ”

“ Characters.—Hairs of body long, but thin on the head, body, limbs and tail; hair of crown very long and projecting over the face and the sides of head, forming what has been called a "hood." Face nude, flesh-coloured; cheeks and lower jaw nearly nude also, but the skin of a blackish hue. Hair on back black, intermingled with numerous others which are yellowish-grey in colour; crown and back of head, hands, and feet black—the hairs black throughout. Nude part of tail flesh-coloured. The hands have a rudiment of a thumb in the shape of a small tubercle. ”

“ In the pressing out of worms, I could tell whether there were hairs in them or no, for if the substance came out streight, then there were always hairs, but if bended and bow'd, none.
The make and conformation of these worms, I suppose to be after this manner. When the Root of a hair lying deep in the skin, supplies so much nourishment as to make the hair grow out and appear upon the face, the upper part of the hair by rubbing, or some other violence, comes often to be broke off, the Trunk of it still remaining in the skin. ”

“ Hair, which forms the characteristic Mammalian exoskeleton, varies much in different animals, and in different parts of the same animal. A large proportion of mammals have the surface fairly uniformly covered with hair of one kind only. In some forms however there are two kinds of hair, a longer and stiffer kind alone appearing on the surface, and a shorter and softer kind forming the under fur. In most mammals hairs of a special character occur in certain regions, such as above the eyes, on the margins of the eyelids, and on the lips and cheeks, here forming the vibrissae or whiskers. ”

“ Every hair has a root, just as a tree has, and through this root it receives its nourishment. As the vessel [Pg 252] which feed a plant are always proportionate to the size of the plant itself, how fine must be those vessels which form the roots of the hair, being in proportion to the size of the hair, which is in itself so small that the eye cannot see its structure? The hair is, in fact, an animal plant, growing upon the body in much the same manner that plants grow upon the surface of the earth. ”

“ Yet the whole body is covered with a thin growth of hair, useless for any purpose of protection, and only explainable as a survival from the mammalian covering. The occasional considerable development of the hair is an indication pointing to such an origin. This applies not only to individuals, but to tribes or races, as in the instances of the Ainos of Japan and some of the Pygmies of Africa. The disappearance of the hair in man has been traced to no well established cause. Darwin's view that it may have been a result of sexual selection seems the most probable explanation. ”

“ At some time the progenitors of man and his co-descendants became covered all over with a coat of hair. What remains upon our bodies of this peculiar growth, that is called hair, is what was left after the agency of natural selection had worked off what was useless to the successive animals, and sexual selection had operated to transmit to offspring the absence of hair that had accrued in the nearer progenitors and the immediate parents. ”

“ The accompanying figures (figs. 72 to 76)
serve to shew the arrangement of the hair on the face and head in several species. It is scarcely conceivable that these crests of hair, and the strongly contrasted colours of the fur and skin, can be the result of mere variability without the aid of selection; and it is inconceivable that they can be of use in any ordinary way to these animals. If so, they have probably been gained through sexual selection, though transmitted equally, or almost equally, to both sexes. ”

“ Perhaps the most conservative and most reliable character that serves for the broad classification of the human races is the shape of the individual hairs of the head. We are familiar with the straight lank hair of the Mongolian peoples and of the various tribes of American Indians, in whom the hair possesses these peculiarities because each element grows as a nearly perfect cylinder from the cells of the skin at the bottom of a tiny pit or hair-follicle. ”

“ The second bird darted angrily at the first and after a struggle succeeded in capturing one of the golden hairs. One hair dropped to the marble floor, making as it struck a musical tinkle, and the first bird escaped still holding in its bill a single hair. ”

“ Each hair was about the bigness of a large angleworm, and as the thing moved the muscles of its scalp this awful head-covering seemed to writhe and wriggle and crawl about the fearsome face as though indeed each separate hair was endowed with independent life. ”

“ How good it did feel to be bare-headed, after all that long winter! Cool inside your hair at the roots, and warm outside where the sun pressed on it. Cool wind and warm sun, two different things that added up to make one lovely feel for a little girl. The way your hair tugged at its roots, all streaming away; every single little hair tied tight to your head at one end, and yet so wildly loose at the other; tight, strong, firm, and yet light and limber and flag-flapping . ”

“ If each hair had possessed as many roots as a scrub oak sapling, and had grown the wrong way, with the roots out, there couldn't have been more; or if each individual hair had been grafted with a score of thrifty shoots, and each of them, in turn, had given off a multitude of sandy-colored sprouts, and each separate sprout had taken an unconquerable aversion to every other sprout, and was striving to grow in an independent direction of its own, there wouldn't have been a more abundant display of hair, growing towards a greater variety of hitherto unknown points of compass. ”

“ But it is most especially noticeable in mammals, which have frequently the under side almost entirely bare of hair, while the back is covered with a copious crop. Now, it would seem as though this scantiness of natural clothing on the under side were due to long continued pressure against the ground, causing the hair to be worn away, and being hereditarily transmitted in its effects to descendants. We are, therefore, led to inquire whether all parts of the mammalian body which come into frequent contact with other objects are specially liable to lose their hair. ”

“ Development of the Hair.—We have seen that male quadrupeds often have the hair on their necks and shoulders much more developed than the females; and many additional instances could be given. This sometimes serves as a defence to the male during his battles ”

“ Every child comes into the world with a coat of rudimentary hair which is shed at once. Aside from the growth of hair on the head, including the brows and the lashes, the skin is quite free from any noticeable growth of hair for months or even years. Beginning at the age of [29] puberty, however, the growth of hair is very much accelerated over the whole pilous surface of the body, particularly upon the face, in the axilla and over the pubic region. It is a generally recognized law of biology, that, at the period of sexual development, the hairy mammalian character becomes accentuated. ”

“ I arranged my hair, on which I piqued myself, and which I loved to groom in those days. That dark-brown chevelure, with a natural curl, is now represented by a few dozen perfectly white hairs, and its place—a smooth, bald, pink head—knows it no more. ”

“ The men would thrust the pinkish tail-feathers of the Tropic-bird upright into the bunch of hair on the top of their head, or wear whimsical garlands of flowers or scarlet seeds, or wigs made of dogs' hair, or men's hair, or coconut matting. ”

“ Hence, while the unborn of these animals still cling to the structural traditions of their ancestors and are covered with hair, the adults are almost hairless. The sartorial habits of human beings and the selective influences of the sexes have had a similar effect on the hairy covering of the human body. Hair exists all over the human body surface, excepting on the soles of the hands and feet, but in a greatly dwarfed condition. It is only on the scalp and on the faces of males, where it is scientifically assisted for purposes of display, that it grows luxuriantly. ”

“ As for hair, men differ in this themselves at different ages, and also from all other kinds of animals that have hair. These are almost all which are internally viviparous, for even when the covering of such animals is spiny it must be considered as a kind of hair, as in the land hedgehog and any other such animal among the vivipara. Hairs differ in respect of hardness and softness, length and shortness, straightness and curliness, quantity and scantiness, and in addition to these qualities, in their colours, whiteness and blackness and the intermediate shades. ”

“ Although hair is of a tubular construction, yet all varieties are not of a completely cylindrical form; a curl is the result of all flat-sided or oval hairs, the exceeding oval being the unfailing characteristic of the negro race. A cross section of a hair, if circular, denotes the long, soft, and lank fibre of a cold northern animal; but if the cross section shows an extreme flat-sided hair, that hair will be crisp and frizzled, and of a tropical extraction. ”

“ Exceptional hair on the face, as on the whole body, is hereditary in certain families of hairy men. The quantity and the quality of the hair on head and chin are also conspicuously transmitted in families. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The fact that our coat of hair is inherited directly from the anthropoid apes is proved in an interesting way, according to Darwin, by the direction of the rudimentary hairs on our arms, which cannot be explained in any other way. ”

“ A human hair, cut in the same manner, shews a variety of vessels in very regular figures. Hair taken from the head, the eyebrows, the nostrils, the beard, the hand, &c. appear unlike, as well in the roots as in the hairs themselves, and vary as plants do of the same genus, but of different species. Those of the hedgehog contain a kind of real marrow, which is whitish, and formed of radii meeting in a centre. A split hair appears like a stick shivered with beating.
Nothing can be more curious than the appearance exhibited by mouldiness, when viewed through a microscope. ”