RUDIMENTS. 21 



peculiarity seems to be inherited. These hairs, too, seem 

 to have their representatives; for in the chimpanzee, and in 

 certain species of Macacus, there are scattered hairs of con- 

 siderable length rising from the naked skin above the eyes, 

 and corresponding to our eyebrows; similar long hairs pro- 

 ject from the hairy covering of the superciliary ridges in 

 some baboons. 



The fine wool-like hair, or so-called lanugo, with which 

 the human foetus during the sixth month is thickly cov- 

 ered, offers a more curious case. It is first developed, dur- 

 ing the fifth month, on the eyebrows and face, and espe- 

 cially round the mouth, where it is much longer than that 

 on the head. A mustache of this kind was observed by 

 Eschricht* on a female foetus; but this is not so surprising 

 a circumstance as it may at first appear, for the two sexes 

 generally resemble each other in all external characters 

 during an early period of growth. The direction and 

 arrangement of the hairs on all parts of the foetal body are 

 the same as in the adult^ but are subject to much varia- 

 bility. The whole surface, including even the forehead 

 and ears, is thus thickly clothed; but it is a significant fact 

 that the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet are 

 quite naked, like the inferior surfaces of all four extremi- 

 ties in most of the lower animals. As this can hardly be 

 an accidental coincidence, the woolly covering of the foetus 

 probably represents the first permanent coat of hair in those 

 mammals which are born hairy. Three or four cases have 

 been recorded of persons born with their whole bodies and 

 faces thickly covered with fine long hairs; and this strange 

 condition is strongly inherited, and is correlated with an 

 abnormal condition of the teeth, f Prof. Alex. Brandt in- 

 forms me that he has compared the hair from the face of a 

 man thus characterized, aged thirty-five, with the lanugo 

 of a fcetus, and finds it quite similar in texture; therefore, 

 as he remarks, the case may be attributed to an arrest of 

 development in the hair, together with its continued 

 growth. Many delicate children, as I have been assured 

 by a surgeon to a hospital for children, have their backs 



* Eschricht, ibid., s. 40, 47. 



| See my "Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication/* 

 vol. ii, p. 227. Prof. Alex. Brandt has recently sent me an additional 

 case of a father and son, born in Russia, with these peculiarities. I 

 nave received drawings of both from Paris* 



