Steps of the Inquiry.

Having expounded the text and its context, I would mention that in 1897 I came across these views of biologists as to the very strange arrangement of hair on man’s forearm, and was struck with the inadequacy of the theory of Darwin, Wallace and Romanes to account for the state of things which every man can find, if he looks for it, on his own forearm. I examined a large number of apes and monkeys so as to test the theory, and the results were published in Nature, Vol. 55, under the title “Certain vestigial characters in Man.” Suffice it to say that from the evidence I brought forward one had to choose between two heresies: either to deny the Simian ancestry of man or to affirm the inheritance of some acquired characters; and I chose the latter. The choice of “evils” or heresies which had to be made then will serve as an introduc­tion to all that follows.

This article was followed by a paper at the Zoological Society of London on “The Hair-Slope in certain Typical Mammals,” and after this came a paper at the same Society, giving evidence and reason why certain patterns of hair in some mammals should rank as specific characters. Various other papers at the Anatomical Society of Great Britain and Ireland were read and published and others at the Zoological Society, in which different regions of the hairy coat of man and lower mammals were dealt with. In 1903 the whole subject of the Direction of Hair in Animals and Man was treated in a book freely illustrated.

I then followed the advice of Horace and left the subject alone for nine years, during which time my further observations and reflections served but to confirm, except in two or three unimportant details, the results and conclusions in the book and papers of an earlier date. The connec­tion between the habits of an animal and the distribu­tion of its hairy coat were always cropping up, and I saw then and see now no possible explana­tion of the connec­tion than that the former is the efficient cause of the latter.