One of the most useful of all our natural endowments is what I may venture to call the conscience of the organs. None of the bodily organs is willing to be maintained in a state of idleness and dependence—to eat the bread of charity, so to speak. Whenever for any cause one of them is put upon the retired list and deprived of its functions and just influence in the physical economy it begins to withdraw from the scheme of things by atrophy. It withers away, and the place that knew it knows it no more forever. That is what is occurring in the instance of the human nose. We make very little use of it in testing our food—it has, in truth, lost its cunning in that way—in tracking our game, or in taking note of a windward enemy; albeit to most of the enemies of the race the nose is almost as good an annunciator as the organs which they more consciously address. So the idle nose is leaving us—more in sorrow than in anger, let us hope.
With the hair the case is different. It goes, not merely because its mandate is exhausted, but because it is really detrimental to us in the struggle for existence. Its departure is an instance, pure and simple of the survival of the fittest. Little reflection is required to show the superior fitness of the man that is bald. Baldness is respectability, baldness is piety, rectitude and general worth. Persons holding responsible and well-salaried positions are commonly bald—bank presidents especially. The prosperous merchant is usually of shining pate; the heads of most of the great corporations are thinly thatched. Of two otherwise equal applicants for a position of trust and profit, who would not instinctively choose the bald one, or, both being bald, the balder? Having, therefore, a considerable advantage, the bald person naturally lives longer than his less gifted competitor (any one can observe that he is usually the older) and leaves a more numerous progeny, inheriting the paternal endowment of precarious hair. In a few generations more those varieties of our species known as the Mophead and the Curled Darling will doubtless have become extinct, and the barber (Homo loquax) will have followed them into oblivion.
Another German physician (named Müller—the German physician who is not named Müller has had a narrow escape) points out the increasing prevalence of baldness and declares it hereditary. That many human beings are born partly bald is not, I take it, what he means, but that the tendency to lose the hair early in life is transmitted from father to son. It is understood that the ladies have nothing to do with the matter; they are never bald, but the hair of none of them, I understand, is so long and thick as it once was.
It is difficult to offset such facts as these with facts of a contrary sort. Cowboys and artists—sometimes poets—are found with long hair, but long hair is not thought to be an advantage to them, if, indeed, any hair at all is. For wiping the bowie-knife, the paint brush or the pen, hair, no doubt, is useful, but hardly more so than the coat-sleeve. Even in these instances, then, where at first thought there might seem to be a relation of cause and effect between length of hair and length of life, the appearance is fallacious. A bald-headed cowboy would, however, be less liable to scalping by the Red Man. It appears, then, that Dr. Müller’s cheerful prediction regarding the heads of Posterity rests upon a foundation of truth.
Some of the doctor’s arguments, however, seem erroneous. For example, he thinks the masculine fashion of cutting off the hair an evidence that men instinctively know hair to be injurious—that is to say, a disadvantage in the struggle for existence. This I can not admit; it does not follow, for testators have a fashion of cutting off legatees-expectant, yet legatees-expectant are not injurious—until known to be cut off; and then the testator’s struggle for existence is commonly finished. Capitalists have a fashion of cutting off coupons; it hardly needs to be pointed out that coupons are not amongst the malign influences tending to the shortening of life.
I have tried (with some success, I hope) to show that hair is a disadvantage, but this view derives no support from the scissors. If the hair of men were obviously, conspicuously beneficial; if it made them healthy, wealthy and as wise as they care to be; if they needed it in their business; if they could not at all get on without it—they would doubtless cut it a little oftener and a little closer than they do now. Men are that way.
The truth of the matter is plain enough. Men become bald because they keep cutting their hair. Every man has a certain amount of capillary energy, so to say. He can produce such a length of hair and no more, as the spider can spin only so much web and then must cease to be a spinster. By cutting the hair we keep it exhausting its allowance of energy by growth; when all is gone growth stops, and the roots, having no longer a use, decay. By letting their hair grow as long as it will women retain it. The difference is the same as that between two coils of rope, equal in length, one of which is constantly payed out, the other not. If this explanation do not compose the immemorial controversy about the cause of men’s baldness the prospect of its composure by that phenomenon’s universality will be hailed with delight by all who love a quiet life. The first generation to forget that men ever had hair will be the first to know the happiness of peace; the succeeding one will begin a dispute about the cause of hair in woman.
An important discovery made and stated with confidence is that to the human tooth, also, civilization is hateful and insupportable. Dr. Denison Pedley, whose name carries great weight (and would to whomsoever it might belong) examined the teeth of no fewer than 3,114 children, and only 707 had full sets of sound ones. That was in England; what would be shown by a look-in at the mouths of the young of a more highly civilized race—say the Missourians—one shudders to conjecture. That nearly all the savages whom one meets have good enough teeth is a matter of common observation; and missionaries in some of the remoter parts of Starkest Africa attest this fact with much feeling. Yet in all enlightened countries the prosperous dentist abounds in quantity.
But perhaps the most significant testimony is that of another English gentleman, with another honored name—J. K. Mummery, who examined every skull that he could lay his eyes on during twenty years. He affirms an almost total absence of caries among the oldest specimens, those belonging to the Stone Age. Among the Celts, who succeeded these, and who knew enough to make metal weapons, but not enough to refrain from using them, the decayed tooth was an incident of more frequent occurrence; and the Roman conquest introduced it in great profusion. When the Romans were driven out they took their back teeth along with them, but the flawless incisor, the hale bicuspid are afterward rarely encountered. Craniologists affirm a similar state of things wherever there have been successive or overlapping civilizations: the skulls all tell the same story—their vote is unanimous. If the alarming progress of enlightenment be not stayed the hairless and noseless man of the future will undoubtedly subsist, not as we, upon his neighbor, but upon spoon-victuals and memories of the past.