Procedure.
The order of proceedings may be tabulated thus:—
(1) Observation of selected facts.
(2) Evidence that certain of these are produced in the lifetime of the individual.
(3) Evidence that among the facts of direction of hair and others there is to be seen an orderly evolution rather than a casual appearance of the changes noted.
(4) An hypothesis as to their production.
(5) Exclusion of selection as a possible cause of these, and of correlation as properly understood.
(6) Experiment in verification of the Lamarckian interpretation of the phenomena.
And here, before I hear some Prince Henry of the genus Weismann, Mendel or Gallio groan aloud: “This intolerable amount of sack,” I proceed to offer him a few loaves of home-made bread.
CHAPTER VI.
EVIDENCE FROM ARRANGEMENT OF HAIR.
Ex Uno Disce Omnes.
The singular arrangement of hair on the forearm of man is the subject of some curious statements by Darwin, Wallace and Romanes, and these suggested to me twenty years ago the following line of thought. To many minds the text will appear a humble one, but it opens many avenues of inquiry.
These three illustrious men are all more or less inaccurate and incomplete in their descriptions of the hair on man’s forearm, though Romanes[42] gives a drawing which supplements his written account. They looked upon it as a vestige of the pattern of hair on the forearm of existing anthropoid apes, especially the orang, in whom its fully-developed form was an adaptation governed by Natural Selection. Of the three, Wallace is the most uncompromising on behalf of this view, Romanes rather accepts it en passant, and Darwin in a long passage[43] adopts it with some reserve and his usual respect for the work of his great co-worker, as the most probable explanation of a fact which lay heavy on his scientific conscience. Indeed, for all these great men it was a crux, though Romanes, with his Lamarckian views, need not have found much difficulty with an alternative account of it.[44]
At the time when these statements were made, the lineal ancestors of man were much more definite personages than they are now, as Arthur, the legendary Celtic hero, was formerly held to be an historical personage more than is the case now. These ancestors were generally believed then to be found among the four existing anthropoid apes. The picture of our ancestor among the apes, as given by Wallace, in connection with this state of the hair on his forearm, represents him as spending much of his time like the gorilla, who, according to Livingstone, “sits in pelting rain with his hands over his head.” He would no doubt find the thatch-like arrangement of the hair a tolerably efficient umbrella, but one may doubt very much if so clever a denizen of the tropics would fail to find under the great branches of trees, in a tropical forest, a better covering and one more like the roofs of our houses. But when we cannot find a roof to our heads we—and the orang or gorilla—naturally employ a substitute, and not otherwise. Be that as it may, it is doubtful if the thatch of his forearms would supply him with that survival value on which the theory of Selection depends, to say nothing of the fact that in its incipient stage the reversal of the slope of hair, inherited from the lemur stock, would be trivial and useless.
But one must ask: “Did man’s Simian ancestor really loaf away so much of his time in this dull manner? and was the running-off of rain so frequent and imperative a need as to make him set to work to invent this special adaptation?”
After some millions of years have passed since his day we are not in a position to go beyond speculations, and this one seems barely credible, moreover, it is quite unnecessary, as certain following facts will show.