596 THE DESCENT OF MAN. 



"a hairy man." All who have seen photographs of the Siameee 

 hairy family will admi., how ludicrously hideous is the opposite 

 extreme of excessive hairiness. And the king of Siam had to 

 bribe a man to marry the first hairy woman in the family; and 

 she transmitted this character to her young offspring of both 

 sexes.^ 



Some races are much more hairy than others, especially the 

 males; but it must not be assumed that the more hairy races, 

 such as the European, have retained their primordial condition 

 more completely than the naked races, such as the Kalmucks or 

 Americans. It is more probable that the hairiness of the former 

 is due to partial reversion; for characters which have been at 

 some former period long inheritea, are always apt to return. "We 

 have seen that idiots are often very hairy, and they are apt to 

 revert in other characters to a lower animal type. It does not 

 appear that a cold climate has been influential in leading to this 

 kind of reversion; excepting perhaps with the negroes, who have 

 been reared during several generations in the United States," 

 and possibly with the Ainos, who inhabit the northern islands of 

 the Japan Archipelago. But the lav/s of inheritance are so com- 

 plex that we can seldom understand their action. If the greater 

 hairiness of certain races be the result of reversion, unchecked by 

 any form of selection, its extreme variability, even within the 

 limits of the same race, ceases to be remarkable. 



With respect to the bearu in man, if we turn to our best guide, 

 the Quadrumana, we find beards equally developed in both sexss 



^ 'The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication,' vol. ii. 

 1868, p. 327. 



^ 'Investigations into Military and Anthropological Statistics of 

 American Soldiers,' by B. A. Gould, 1869; p. 568:— Observations were 

 carefully made on the .xairiness ( 2129 black and colored soldiers, whilst 

 they were bat»,ing; and by looking to the published table, "it is mani- 

 "fest at a glance that there is but little, if any, difference between the 

 "white and the black races in this respect." It is, however, certain 

 that negroes in their native and much hotter land of Africa, have 

 remarkably smooth bodies. It should be particularly observed, that 

 both pure blacks and mulattoes were included in the above enumer- 

 ation; and this is an unfortunate circumstance, as in accordance with 

 u, principle, the truth of which I have elsewhere proved, crossed races 

 of man would be eminently liable to revert to the primordial hairy 

 character of their early ape-like progenitors. 



2* Hardly any view advanced in this work has met with so much 

 disfavor (see for instance, Spengel, 'Die Portschritte des Darwinismus,' 

 1874, p. 80) as the above explanation of the loss of hair in mankind 

 through sexual selection; but none of the opposed arguments seem to 

 me of much weight, in comparison with the facts showing that the 

 nudity of the skin Is to a certain extent a secondary sexual character 

 in man and in some of the Quadrumana. 



