CHAPTER VI. 

 EVIDENCE FROM ARRANGEMENT OF HAIR. 



Ex Uno Disce Omnes. 



The singular arrangement of hair on the forearm of man is the 

 subject of some curious statements by Darwin, Wallace and 

 Romanes, and these suggested to me twenty years ago the follow- 

 ing line of thought. To many minds the text will appear a humble 

 one, but it opens many avenues of inquiry. 



These three illustrious men are all more or less inaccurate 

 and incomplete in their descriptions of the hair on man's forearm, 

 though Romanes 1 gives a drawing which supplements his written 

 account. They looked upon it as a vestige of the pattern of hair 

 on the forearm of existing anthropoid apes, especially the orang, 

 in whom its fully-developed form was an adaptation governed by 

 Natural Selection. Of the three, Wallace is the most uncompromis- 

 ing on behalf of this view, Romanes rather accepts it en passant, 

 and Darwin in a long passage 2 adopts it with some reserve and his 

 usual respect for the work of his great co-worker, as the most pro- 

 bable explanation of a fact which lay heavy on his scientific con- 

 science. Indeed, for all these great men it was a crux, though 

 Romanes, with his Lamarckian views, need not have found much 

 difficulty with an alternative account of it. 3 



At the time when these statements were made, the lineal 

 ancestors of man were much more definite personages than they 

 are now, as Arthur, the legendary Celtic hero, was formerly held 

 to be an historical personage more than is the case now. These 

 ancestors were generally believed then to be found among the 

 four existing anthropoid apes. The picture of our ancestor among 



1 Darwin and after Darwin, Vol. 1, p. 90. 



2 The Descent of Man, Chap. VI., p. 151. 



3 I may remark that Darwin seems at an earlier date to have made a 

 very curious suggestion in this connection, for Hartmann, in his work on 

 Anthropoid Apes, p. 99, quotes him as saying : "We should, however, bear 

 in mind that the attitude of an animal may perhaps be in part determined 

 by the direction of the hair ; and not the direction of the hair by the attitude," 

 a notion so obviously untenable that it does not appear in the second edition 

 of The Descent of Man, 1896. 



