I ee | 8 id 
984 A JOURNEY UP THE RIVER CONGO. 
complacency to the gaze of foes and friends; not, as 
has been thought, in a spirit of insult, but rather as the 
peacock erects his train and rattles his quills to ravish and 
overawe the looker-on. So in bygone ages the females 
of incipient man contemplated with satisfaction the grow- 
ing nakedness of their husbands, much in the same spirit 
as the she-galada monkey admires and strokes with a 
tender touch the ereat bald patch on the breast of her 
mate. The hands and feet and face are naked in most 
monkeys of the old world, the hinder parts in baboons are 
bald and brilliant. Thenceforth, as some aspiring ape 
struggled on towards humanity, it was rather a gradual 
diminution of hairiness that supervened than absolute — 
nakedness, for few men’s bodies and limbs in a natural 
state are devoid of hair. 
When man had lost all or nearly all the hair which in 
so many mammals becomes developed into striking orna-. 
ments in the male sex, he had attained a sufficient degree 
of intelligence to abandon the slow workings of natuie, 
and to call in the aid of art or in ministering to his 
inherent vanity and in decorating his person so as to 
render it more attractive in the eyes of his women. The 
beard and moustache, though already existing in less 
pronounced forms in the higher apes, received a. slight 
ulterior development in man, but beyond this there was 
little attempt made to secure any striking physical attrac- 
tion or any analogous development of epidermal colour or 
excrescence such as we meet in many monkeys.* On the 
contrary, man seems to have rather degenerated into 
physical uniformity and insignificance. Looked at from 
the point of view of an antlered stag or a graceful leopard, — 
a naked man seems a poor sort of creature. The higher 
beauty of his well-moulded form, and his marked adapta- 
tion to his career, is only perceptible to the asthetically- 
educated minds of his most highly developed examples. 
In the very early days of the history of our genus, 
* As, for instance, the blue-ribbed cheeks of the mandrill, the | 
brilliantly-coloured genital organs of other baboons, the mane of the — 
gelada and colobus, &c. 
