Unstriped Muscles.

The simplest of the muscular acquirements of mammals is of course that great mass of little structures which constitutes the unstriped musculature. I must admit that here again I am engaged with what the professed biologist may call trifles, but these, like some others of a corresponding rank, have a provoking quality of persistence, and display, if one may personify them, an insistent desire to know whence they come and why they are here. Some of these, like the one before us, may be comprehended in the great chapter of the Evolution of the Indifferent of which they form a page. This world, at any rate in the moral sphere, would be an intolerable house of bondage if there were not many things that matter not as well as things that matter, and there is reason to believe that in the process of the making of man and a vast number of forms below him there is a large field of structures, parts and organs, where things that matter not are to be found. One strange province of this realm is the coloura­tion of animals in certain regions where no eye ever can see the colour or can take any heed of the markings, treated very fully many years ago by Mr. Beddard in Animal Coloura­tion.

Unstriped muscle arises, as the striped variety does, from the mesoblastic muscle-plate and appears in nearly all organs, blood-vessels and skin, and as trade is said to follow the flag, so a development of new unstriped muscles must speedily be found in every new structure of the regions where unstriped muscle is found. The skin is the simplest, and less complicated by the presence of other structures than vessels and organs, where it also exists, but where it trespasses too much on the territory of selection for my immediate purpose. A small band of this muscle called an arrector, or erector, pili is attached to most, if not all, of the third of a million hairs which cover the skin of man, and is inserted into that side of each hair which forms an obtuse angle with the plane of the skin. This tiny structure is endowed with the quality of contracting in response to certain stimuli falling on the skin, so that it causes the hair to which it is attached to stand erect instead of sloping, and incidentally squeezes some of the secretion out of the sebaceous gland which lies in each angle. The human skin thus possesses about a third of a million minute muscular bands and shows no sign of parting with this old gift from a lower hairy stock, and whatever value, if any, their function be to their possessor they show a remarkable readiness to perform it efficiently. It makes their existence and persistence no clearer to call them vestigial, for one only thus throws the question of their origin much farther back. Undoubtedly they come from afar and were in full development in the earliest hair-clad mammals, so an ancestry reaching back to Monotremes or Marsupials is not to be lightly set aside. The raw material was undoubtedly formed in response to stimuli conveyed to the brain, and the earliest appearance of muscles which erected the hairs must have been wholly insignificant either upon the survival or comfort of the possessors.