Chap. XX. 
ABSENCE OF HAIR. 
377 
tively to the size of their bodies. The hair, however, 
appears to have been removed in these cases, not for 
the sake of nudity, but that the colour of the skin 
should be more fully displayed. So again with many 
birds the head and ueck have been divested of feathers 
through sexual selection, for the sake of exhibiting the 
brightly-coloured skin. 
As woman has a less hairy body than man, and as 
this character is common to all races, we may con- 
clude that our female semi-human progenitors were 
probably first partially divested of hair ; and that this 
occurred at an extremely remote period before the 
several races had diverged from a common stock. As 
our female progenitors gradually accjuired this new 
character of nudity, they must have transmitted it in 
an almost equal degree to their young offspring of both 
sexes ; so that its transmission, as in the case of many 
ornaments with mammals and birds, has not been 
limited either by age or sex. There is nothing sur- 
prising in a partial loss of hair having been esteemed 
as ornamental by the ape-like progenitors of man, for 
're have seen that with animals of all kinds innumerable 
strange characters have been thus esteemed, and have 
consequently been modified through sexual selection. 
Nor is it surprising that a character in a slight degree 
injurious should have been thus acquired ; for we know 
that this is the case with the plumes of some birds, and 
with the horns of some stags. 
The females of certain anthropoid apes, as stated in a 
former chapter, are somewhat less hairy on the under 
surface than are the males ; and here we have what 
'night have afforded a commencement for the process 
°f denudation. With respect to the completion of the 
Process through sexual selection, it is well to bear in 
mind the New' Zealand proverb, “there is no woman 
