Lying Attitude.

Fig. 39.—Foreleg of do­mes­tic dog, show­ing re­versed hair on under sur­face, which rests on the ground in ly­ing pos­ture.

Fig. 40.—Showing chest of domestic dog, with reversed area of hair on each side.

There are four attitudes adopted by the dog in lying. In the first, when he sleeps he lies stretched out on his side on some surface, with his limbs projected nearly straight out, and in the second, he curls himself up in his armchair in a cosy, rounded posture. But in both these attitudes there is no such sliding pressure as will affect in any way the direction of his hair. In two other favourite attitudes it is far otherwise. When he lies prone he plants his fore limbs out before his chest and either raises his head to the level of his trunk or rests it on his fore paws. Each of these attitudes contributes to a very well-marked change of the hair on the under surface of his fore arms, to use a convenient human term, one which carries us back to the story of man and the apes when their fore arms were discussed. On this surface, from the mechanical conditions involved, a new force, that of sliding pressure, comes into play. The skin here is very loose, as indeed it is in the greater part of his body, which may almost be said to form one large subcutaneous bursa. The weight of the fore part of his body and head acts downwards and forwards, and thus opposes the normal or downward course of the hair on the limb, such as one sees on the upper surface of his fore arm. The resultant of these two forces has the effect of acting against the normal slope, and a reversed direction of the hair is produced very much like that which is seen in many monkeys and in a small area in man. This is shown in Fig. 39, which appeared in the small book[54], to which reference has been made, and it is confined to the part of the limb where the sliding pressure is seen to act. In this feature again there is a record of his resting habits, and, of course, the time he spends in the fourth attitude with his chin resting on his fore paws contributes its share, the mechanical conditions being similar.

This fourth attitude brings in another force of its own towards the “make-up” of the dog’s patterns of hair. When lying with his head supported on his paws the lower part of his chest is closely applied to the upper or flexor surface of the fore legs, and the long-continued pressure of the latter against the downward or normal streams of hair on the chest leads to its slope being reversed. This is shown in two wide patterns of the whorl, feathering and crest, Fig. [40], resembling closely the corresponding patterns on the chest of a horse. I had the opportunity many years ago of examining in the Capitol Museum at Rome two fine sculptures of Molossian hounds, when these matters of hair-arrangement were occupying my attention, and was much struck with the fidelity with which the ancient sculptor reproduced such small facts as the reversed areas of hair in a dog. Phiz himself was not more true to Nature in his delinea­tion of the projecting hairs on the human eyebrows. It should be added that the reversed hair in question occupies only that part of the chest which is in contact with the fore limb. If one cannot reckon any animal pedometers, to the credit of the domestic dog I think one may fairly and metaphorically say that his hairy coat gives an accurate mould of his habits.

CHAPTER XIII.
HABITS AND HAIR OF PRIMATES.

In spite of the satires of Swift we may not cavil at the natural pride which has led man, Homo Sapiens, as he also calls himself, to confer boldly on himself, and his lineal ancestors at any rate, the name of Primates. This large and highest group of hair-clad mammals includes broadly and somewhat loosely lemurs, monkeys, apes and man. The last has not lost his hairy endowment, though it is sadly curtailed, and it is well to remember that, except on the palms of the hands, the soles of the feet and the terminal rows of phalanges of fingers and toes, man is a hair-clad mammal. Shakespeare calls him “paragon of animals,” and Huxley “head of the sentient world,” and no reasonable person will attempt to improve upon such pregnant tributes to his greatness. I desire only to adhere that quâ animal he is the best of all for my humble purpose of historian of the chequered course of the mammalian hair, better even than the domestic horse. His hair varies from a coat so fine as to need a lens for the discovery of the separate hairs, to a truly Simian profusion of thick and long hair such as that of the Ainu or hairy aborigines of Japan.