THE OEIGIN OF MAN 25 



greater strength of the male mind, he turns his atten-" 

 tion to another question, namely, how did man become 

 a hairless animal ? This he accounts for also by sex- 

 ual selection — the females preferred the males with the 

 least hair (page 624). In a footnote on page 625 he 

 says that this view has been harshly criticized. 

 " Hardly any view advanced in this work," he says, 

 " has met with so much disfavour." A comment and 

 a question: First, Unless the brute females were very 

 different from the females as we know them, they 

 would not have agreed in taste. Some would " prob- 

 ably " have preferred males with less hair, others, " we 

 may well suppose," would have preferred males with 

 more hair. Those with more hair would naturally be 

 the stronger because better able to resist the weather. 

 But, second, how could the males have strengthened 

 their minds by fighting for the females if, at the same 

 time, the females were breeding the hair off by select- 

 ing the males? Or, did the males select for three 

 years and then allow the females to do the selecting 

 during leap year? 



But, worse yet, in a later edition published by L. A. 

 Burt Company, a " supplemental note " is added to 

 discuss two letters which he thought supported the idea 

 that sexual selection transformed the hairy animal into 

 the hairless man. Darwin's correspondent (page 710) 

 reports that a mandril seemed to be proud of a bare 

 spot. Can anything be less scientific than trying to 

 guess what an animal is thinking about? It would 

 seem that this also was a subject about which it was 

 " useless to speculate." 



