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.
Hair and Habits of Man.
The streams of his hair demonstrate two important facts about man: first what he has been; secondly what he has done, that is to say, his ancestry and habits of life, through an immense stretch of time. These stories in hair are the culmination of a large number of characters inherited and acquired, and their study in two selected regions of lemurs, apes and man will be pursued in this chapter on the lines which I laid down in Chapter VI. I have thought it well not to give any connected account of the rest of his hairy covering so as to concentrate attention on the two simplest and most striking regions. The charts of his hair-streams and those of the lemur and ape have been described with sufficient fulness elsewhere,[55] and no cartographer has hitherto sought to improve upon them.
The back and the front surfaces of the trunk afford the two best and most instructive fields of study, for the forces which act upon them are of a simple kind, and may be traced upwards from the lemurs to man as in the case of the forearms. The three drawings (Fig. [41]) represent the backs of a lemur, chimpanzee and man, most of the details of the hair being omitted and their place taken by thick dark arrows which show the line of the different hair-streams. This diagrammatic method will make any misunderstanding of the main facts impossible.
The lemur has on the back of its neck a forward or headward slope of hair and this passes on to the head itself, and on the back of the trunk, as the arrows show, there is no departure from the normal arrangement of the lower mammals. The lemur, therefore, requires neither further description nor explanation.
The ape shows no material change in this region from the arrangement of its lemur or monkey ancestor, in spite of the greater proportion of its life which is spent in the upright posture; indeed, this is what one would expect.