37 



at once from the province of natural selection, by the mere 

 statement of the case. As to sexual selection they are 

 equally put out of court and removed from its sphere of 

 influence, for they are barely visible to the naked eye in some 

 forms, and in all they are not attended by any prominent 

 markings or colouration capable of attracting attention. As to 

 Weismann's germinal selection, this need not be considered 

 as affecting them as they do not correspond in any degree to 

 what he calls adaptive requirements arising by selectional 

 processes within the germ. 



As to any vestigial character that might be claimed for 

 them it could only be maintained if any conceivable survival 

 value in the struggle for existence were attributed to them, 

 which it is not. 



We are left with, I think, the only possible interpreta- 

 tion of these characters, the Lamarckian ; which would 

 account for them by means of the results of habits of the 

 particular forms of animals, which they and their ancestors 

 possess or did possess, and by the action of the environments 

 special to each group of animals, these habits and environ- 

 ments remaining substantially unchanged. It is not 

 necessary to follow out all or many of the regions or many 

 of the animals in question. 



There is not much that I can discover in the vast 

 archives of biological literature which bears on the aetiology 

 of the direction of hair on the bodies of animals and man. 



In 1837 Eschricht, and in 1857 C. A. Voigt investigated 

 fully the subject as far as it concerns the body of man, and 

 their views, if true ; would be necessarily applicable to the 

 bodies of other hairy mammals. These views amounted 

 substantially to this, that the direction of hair on the body 

 of man is determined by the shape, size, and rate of growth 

 of the human embryo, during intra-uterine life. There is a 

 simplicity about this view which is attractive, but it fails 

 altogether to fit the remarkable variations in hair-slope on the 

 lower animals, and even if it does so it fails signally on many 

 parts of the body of man. It would be tantamount to saying 

 that all the strange directions taken by the hair on the body 

 of man and other animals were the results of their superficial 

 anatomy. It is not necessary to show how inadequate this 

 view is. I will only mention one other view of the aetiology 

 of hair-slope on the bodies of animals, that of E. E. 



