480 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1921. 



TEMPORARY GRAYNESS. 



The phenomenon of sudden or very rapid graying, generally under 

 the stress of great fear, anxiety, or other deeply disturbing nervous 

 effect, is well known, though more so popularly than to science; but 

 the sequences of such a change are only seldom mentioned. A strik- 

 ing case came to the writer's attention in the course of the studies 

 here reported. It concerns General Greely, the Arctic explorer. 

 General Greely was born in 1844. His hair when he reached the 

 adult life was "chatain" or rather dark brown and it remained so, 

 with probably the appearance of a few gray hairs, until 1884, or 

 towards the end of his exceedingly difficult trip of Arctic explora- 

 tion. Then within the period of some months, under the anxieties 

 and privations of his position, his hair turned completely white. 

 But upon a return to civilization the whiteness began gradually to 

 disappear, until the hair returned to nearly its former condition, 

 after which graying progressed naturally. The following brief per- 

 sonal statement will make a clear record of the case : 



Cosmos Clt.u, 

 Washington, D. C, March 8, 1922. 

 Dear Dr. Hrdlicka : Referring to our conversation a few days since, I con- 

 firm my statement that when rescued at Cape Sabine in 1884 my hair was en- 

 tirely white, due probably to the continuous condition of semistarvation from 

 which 1 suffered for over nine months. Within a year my hair darkened very 

 considerably, though it never returned entirely to its original chatain coloring. 

 Yours, 



A. W. Greely, Major General. 

 Dr. A. Hrdlicka, 



^Yashington, D. C. 



LOSS OF HAIR. 



In modern civilized men the hair of the head does not merely tend 

 to grow gray earlier than in more primitive people, but generally 

 also it is more or less shed as ageing advances, showing a reduced 

 vitality. It would be wrong to attribute either of these phenomena 

 to any particular habits of civilized man or to pathological condi- 

 tions, though both of these may play a part at times; the real causes 

 are already hereditary and thereby of a phylogenetic nature. The 

 hair tends towards an earlier senility and loss, because it has become 

 of less organic use to man living under modern conditions than it 

 has been in the past, and nature does not tolerate for long what has 

 become useless or weakened. Both early graying and physiological 

 loss of hair are a part of the trend of present evolution in civilized 

 humanity. 



Unlike grayness, however, normal loss of hair is largely linked 

 with the male sex. Women lose hair too, and that probably at an 

 increasing rate, but not in the proportion in which the process goes on 

 in the males. 



