94 THE SCAFFOLDING LEFT IN THE BODY. 



have all rudimentary hair on the first row of pha- 

 langes, both of hands and feet ; when present at all, it 

 is more scanty on the second row: and in no case 

 have I been able to find any on the terminal row. In 

 all cases those peculiarities are congenital, and the 

 total absence or partial presence of hair on the second 

 phalanges is constant in different species of Quad- 

 rumana. . . . The downward direction of the hair on 

 the backs of the hands is exactly the same in man as 

 it is in all the anthropoid apes. Again, with regard 

 to hair, Darwin notices that occasionally there appear 

 in man a few hairs in the eyebrows much longer than 

 the others ; and that they seem to be a representation 

 of similarly long and scattered hairs which occur in 

 the chimpanzee, macacus, and baboon. Lastly, about 

 the sixth month the human foetus is often thickly 

 covered with somewhat long dark hair over the entire 

 body, except the soles of the feet and palms of the 

 hand, which are likewise bare in all quadrumanous 

 animals. This covering, which is called the lanugo, 

 and sometimes extends even to the whole forehead, 

 ears, and face, is shed before birth. So that it 

 appears to be useless for any purpose other than that 

 of emphatically declaring man a child of the 

 monkey." ^ The uselessness of these relics, apart from 

 the remarkable and detailed nature of the homolo- 

 gies just brought out, is a circumstance very hard 

 to get over on any other hypothesis than that of 

 Descent. 



Caution, of course, is required in deciding as to the 

 inutility of any character since its seeming uselessness 



1 Darwin and After Darwin^ pp. 89-92. 



