372 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



seconded by their energetic and wide-awake superintendent, 

 Major W. F. Slaton. 



Now, while the statistics at my disposal are too meager to war- 

 rant any definite conclusion, it is nevertheless a significant fact 

 that out of a total of 1,196 males between the ages of ten and twen- 

 ty, ten cases were reported as showing signs of baldness — that is, 

 '00S4, or over eight tenths of one per cent — while in a total of 

 1,374 females of the same age, but one single case is reported, or 

 about '00073, a little over y^-g- of one per cent. In other words, if 

 the unsatisfactory statistics that I have been able to collect can be 

 relied on, the proportion of baldness in boys and girls under 

 twenty is about 80 to 7. As the majority of girls at the age 

 under consideration wear their hair loose, or in simple "Mar- 

 guerite " braids, so that there is little likelihood of deception, 

 while unwholesome headgear or other individual practices can 

 hardly, as yet, have had time to produce any material effect upon 

 either sex, we may regard the differences indicated by the figures 

 as practically due to the working of heredity alone. Now, there 

 is no apparent reason why girls should not inherit a tendency to 

 baldness as well as boys, unless that tendency is checked by some 

 other factor. Such a factor is sexual selection ; for I presume it is 

 hardly necessary to argue here that a bald-headed woman would 

 not stand much chance of "survival" in the struggle for matri- 

 monial honors. As men have always practically done the " se- 

 lecting," and will probably continue to do so more and more as 

 the conditions of modern life render the competition for hus- 

 bands more severe, the woman's voice in the matter, when she 

 has any, being limited to a simple negative, it is not likely that 

 the state of baldness to which the human race is said to be tend- 

 ing will ever affect the feminine half of it. There are compensa- 

 tions in all things ; and while the individual woman may some- 

 times murmur at the hard law of dependence which forces her 

 too often to find in some measly little specimen of masculine 

 humanity her only refuge from starvation, the sex in general has 

 to thank the fastidiousness which their superior position culti- 

 vates in men for its exemption from a defect as destructive of 

 beauty as of comfort. The time is, perhaps, not very far distant 

 when, in the course of human evolution, a man with hair on his 

 head will be as great an anomaly as a bearded woman, but as long 

 as men love beauty and are won by personal charms, so long will 

 women continue to rejoice in those abundant tresses of brown and 

 gold that are one of the chief ornaments of their sex. 



