EVIDENCE FROM ARRANGEMENT OF HAIR 43 



has been bold enough to turn straight upwards in a narrow line, 

 and it was here that our three great leaders saw their chance of 

 claiming for Selection a tiny bit of territory, a kind of Duchy of 

 Luxembourg between two great States, though, as I proceed to 

 show, the claim is disallowed and untenable. 



In the ape the hairs of the forearm are much longer and thicker 

 than those of man, and both on the front and back all point from 

 the wrist to the elbow. 



In the lemur all the hairs point from the elbow to the 

 wrist. 



In the products of Nature there are no freaks, or impish tricks 

 performed, and it is not for nothing she does her work. Every 

 one of them asks for and should receive an explanation consistent 

 with fact and reason, and here comes in the need for studying, 

 as one may, the broad outlines of man's ancestry. His ancestor 

 being now sought in an earlier and more generalized stock than 

 that of the four genera of anthropoid apes known to us, the most 

 instructive and safest line to take is to trace him back to the stock 

 lemur, who remains to-day among the most Chinese or unchanging 

 of known mammals. In his illuminating work. Prehistoric Man 

 and History, Professor Scott Elliott adopts an excellent term, 

 " lemur-monkey -man," to sum up, without missing links, the long 

 ancestry of man. I take the liberty of adapting this term more 

 closely to the present inquiry and use that of lemur-ape-man instead, 

 for whatever may be the relation of man to present apes some ape- 

 like ancestors enter into his genealogical tree. 1 For my purpose 

 the monkey is less useful because "his hair-slope differs so little 

 from that of lemurs, whereas apes have made for themselves a 

 very remarkable position as regards the hair of their forearms. 

 Our series of animals for study is then well represented by the 

 lemur-ape-man — hypothetical, necessary and serviceable. Through 

 all the immense stretch of time occupied in this process of descent 

 there has been ample opportunity for the lemur to change his 

 fashion to that of the ape, and the latter to change to the present 

 fashion of man. 



This simple arrangement of the lemur's hair is common to that 

 of ail the more primitive long -bodied mammals, of which an otter is 

 a good example, and I venture, greatly daring, to call this the 

 normal slope of hair. Somewhere and somehow in the human 

 tree there has appeared a total reversal of the lemur-tj^e ; the 

 stock of apes acquired a new fashion, and gradually discarded 



1 This was written before the publication of Professor Woods-Jones' 

 book Arboreal Man. 



