108 INITIATIVE IN EVOLUTION 



so when lying on his side, is in a potentially and actually sliding 

 position, a fact well known to most persons from their own 

 experience. It is easy to see how such conditions are tending for a 

 third of a man's whole life to reverse in some degree the direction 

 of his hair and how they act as we saw in the case of the sitting 

 posture. But the very common lateral position in sleep contributes 

 its own peculiar share in pushing the hair towards the spine, ceasing 

 to do so only when the prominent muscular border of the vertebral 

 furrow is reached. I think it will escape no careful observer of 

 these simple facts of man's resting life, who also notes the remarkable 

 course of the arrows on his back, that the facts and their present 

 explanation fit one another like a Chubb lock and its key. The 

 only alternative suggestion of the facts is that some being with 

 diabolic power has been at work and laying a trap for poor human 

 biologists in the 20th century AD. 



In confirmation of this process I would refer to an example 

 which agrees very closely with the above explanation. I knew an 

 invalid suffering from pleurisy and lung-disease who was much 

 confined to bed, spending much of his time propped high up on 

 pillows. He had long dark hair on his back and I was often 

 struck, when examining him, with the remarkable way in which 

 the hairs were dragged upon so that they pointed nearly in a 

 vertical upward direction. Here was a little instance of an 

 undesigned experiment in the djniamics of hair. 



Hair of the Chest* 



In the hair-streams on the chest of our chosen three, lemur, 

 ape and man, there are also some remarkable contrasts in the course 

 they take. Fig. 42 shows these in a vivid manner. Precisely 

 as in the case of the hair on the backs of lemurs, apes and man, 

 we find on the chest of those three types a normal direction on the 

 two lower ancestors and an entirely novel arrangement in man ; 

 the former, therefore, will need no verbal description. 



Man, the ever bold explorer and innovator has initiated on 

 his chest, as on his back, a fashion in hair unknown in any of the 

 primates. He is, in respect of his hair on these two regions, sui 

 generis. On the chest there is a critical area extending across the 

 sternum at the level of the second rib from a whorl which is found 

 on each side somewhat above the nipples. This is not less an 

 ancient battle-field than the Border which separated England and 

 Scotland, and it has been the site of its little conflicts, more especially 

 north of the Border, corresponding to those of the wild days of 

 Border warfare of which Scottish history is full. 



