EVIDENCE FROM ARRANGEMENT OF HAIR 49 



The term " normal " is a fine field for dialectics, but neither ordinary- 

 men nor scientific students can do their work without its use, and yet it 

 would have been an intellectual treat to have heard how Huxley, for example, 

 would have turned inside out any opponent who chose to employ it to his 

 dissatisfaction. In a strictly-conducted tournament no evolutionary bio- 

 logist would allow its use — to his adversary. A norm for him exists only 

 as one of Professor Karl Pearson's " conceptual counters," a piece of mental 

 shorthand or hardly more than a pis aller. Among the fundamental con- 

 ceptions of organic evolution there is one which is almost a truism, the doctrine 

 of Heraclitus, -navra pel, the everlasting flux and change of Nature and her 

 products. In strict logic, according to what we all now believe, there 

 is no possible norm. All that one may do is to take stock at a certain epoch 

 of evolution and label, for our own convenience, some group, or organism 

 or structure as " normal " — and go on with our business, collecting some 

 specimens, calling them type-specimens, and putting them in books or cases 

 in the Natural History Museum — and then proceed to business. 



The biological teacher in his class room says he must five, he must have 

 his tools for his work, to which the idle student replies under his breath, 

 " I do not see the necessity," but then few students are now idle, and this 

 jibe does not sting any one ! The examiner must have his normal human 

 anatomy, and would ruthlessly plough any daring examinee who tried to 

 sophisticate the meaning of the term " normal." I have often been struck 

 with what I must call the intellectual audacity of a most eminent leader in 

 physical science and mathematics, who is not unlike a certain great Church, 

 which grants nothing to her adversaries but is not averse from taking. In 

 his Grammar of Science, written with a pen dipped in hydrochloric acid, 

 Professor Karl Pearson four times over, and perhaps more, has the courage 

 to call the human brain in this twentieth century " normal." Has he never 

 heard of the coming Superman of Mr. Bernard Shaw and other prophets ? 

 Thinking sub specie aeternitatis has he here in the West, and at a certain small 

 epoch of time, any right to call the human brain " normal " ? I can only 

 long that there may be more normal brains such as Professor Karl Pearson's, 

 and am almost inclined to echo the prayer of Moses, " Would God all 

 the Lord's people were [such] prophets " ! These comments on the term 

 " normal " imply no complaint against its use, indeed are a claim for it, and 

 I deprecate very much that form of criticism known in boys' schools, domestic 

 circles, and among politicians as the tu quoque reply, and I hope the few 

 ambiguous terms used in this book will pass the censor, and help the reader. 



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