PREFACE.
The Great War imposed on speculative biology a moratorium as in the long vaca-tion of lawyers, in which are causes left over to the next term. And so the old case Lamarck versus Weismann was not heard in the Courts of Science during the war. In the present term it is due to be heard afresh, and at some future date to come up for settlement. The chapters that follow comprise some of the pleadings on behalf of the plaintiff and are part of the brief of a junior counsel. This adjective, alas! signifies not the years—for such are often old enough to be the fathers of the leaders—but the standing and attainments of a junior. But in the open Court of Science, and on suited occasions, it may be the business of a junior to question, in the interests of his client, the authority even of Attorneys-General and Lords Chief Justice. In matters of thought and inquiry it is useless to retreat within a stronghold and bar the gates. It may be satisfactory to himself for one Milner to write a book on behalf of a certain body of doctrine and call it The End of Controversy, but the book should have held the sub-title The End of Progress. The Newtons, Pasteurs and Darwins have seldom wielded the weapon of controversy, though the triumph of The Origin of Species would have been slower without the aid of Darwin’s brilliant champion and candid friend. But, if the leaders seldom need such help, for the Gibeonite it is a matter of course and simple necessity. With all the urbanity due to the great subject-matter should this pleasant duty be performed. Who would not prefer to the fierce Spaniard the genial Portuguese, discussing all subjects without rancour, and lover of bull-fights though he be, taking care to wrap in cork the horns of his fighting bulls?

The earlier chapters treat of the arrangement of the mammalian hair, which has occupied my attention for over twenty
years, and this has led straight to the other subjects, because of their bearing on Lamarckism and Initiative in Evolution. The tentative conclusions reached years ago have been strengthened by further knowledge and reflec-tion, and perhaps by certain criticisms. The furrow ploughed may have been lonely, but the pursuit has not been without the mild pleasure of seeing fresh scattered portions of the field coming into their natural order. The resulting state of mind resembles that of a certain Mr. Burke recorded in the annals of a golf club, second to none, the Ancient, and now Royal Blackheath, among whose minutes appears the following:—

“20th September, 1834.

Present, Mr. Burke, Solus.

The dinner was good, wine abundant, and the utmost harmony prevailed. The want of grouse was severely felt this day.”

It is written on page 101 of the Chronicles of Blackheath Golfers.

My debt to such writings as those of Professors Arthur Keith, Woods Jones, Graham Kerr, and Professors Sherrington, Starling, Sch?fer, McDougall and Ward is too obvious to the reader to need more than a bare mention.

I have to thank one critic, Miss Inez Whipple, now Mrs. H. Wilder Harris, for her able if hostile criticism of two former books of mine which has been of use in this one; and Mr. R. E. Holding for good help extending over many years in the prepara-tion of the illustrations, and for many a good sugges-tion.
W.K.
CHAPTER I. FROM KNOWN TO UNKNOWN
Upward—still upward—still upward to the highest! Such is the claim of modern man for the story of himself and the lower inhabitants of the globe. The zoologists have gone so far as to confer upon him the surname Sapiens—Homo Sapiens. Learned indeed he is, and heir of all the ages, but whether or not his assumed surname be warranted the doctrine of descent with modifica-tion can never again be questioned. The work of Darwin was crowned when he compelled a general acceptance of that doctrine, and now the Descent of Man and the Ascent of Man are equivalent terms for a natural process which has converted man from a thing to a person, and is the founda-tion of all modern thought. The biologist works secure in the knowledge that he is studying some portion of a chain of life stretching back for incalculable ages, and is not careful to produce those missing links demanded by the once formidable foes of his fundamental principle. Haeckel may announce that Pithecanthropus Erectus of Dubois is truly a Pliocene remainder of that famous group of highest Catarrhines which were the immediate pithecoid ancestors of man. This may or may not be true, but if true it makes the descent of man from a lower stock none the surer, the increasing verifica-tion of which is not found to rest on missing links.

Many of the discoveries of modern science are made by proceeding from known phenomena to the unknown, or, more precisely, from the well-known through the little-known to the hitherto unknown.

As to the validity of knowledge it is enough to say this—and pass on—all our knowledge is provisional and imperfect, and much of our ignorance is as transient as ourselves.

There are two chief ways in which historians deal with their subject-matter, though the moderns combine them. When oral tradition gives place to written records the lineal descendant of the bards and annalists collects his scanty authorities and compiles his story from them from beginning to end. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of Bede and Alfred, the Book of Howth, the works of Giraldus Cambrensis, the Chronicles of Froissart and the Memoirs
of de Comines were composed in the only way that was then possible. But the muse of history entered on a deeper and more fruitful course when about ninety years ago the study of documents became an essential feature of historical work. It was then that the historian grew up, entered upon his finest inheritance and assumed his Greek title, Enquirer, Student of facts, Man of research. He is now nothing if not a man of science as well as of letters. With a wealth of documents within his reach so great that the 3239 Vatican cases full of them formed by no means the richest collec-tion in the archives of Europe, he proceeds to read backwards correctly what many an earlier annalist read forwards falsely. “We are still at the beginning of the documentary age which is destined to make history independent of historians, to develop learning at the expense of writing, and to accomplish a revolu-tion in other sciences as well.”1
The Historian a Biologist.

It is not too much to say that he who studies history, national, political, constitutional, ecclesiastical, military or economic is as much a biologist in the widest sense as the botanist and zoologist. Indeed these were till recently termed students of natural history, until the advance of knowledge gave us the various special groups of workers, conveniently called biologists. Though the study of human history by documents is an essential part of the historical method and the student may read his subject backwards, this would not of itself warrant the technical biologist in doing so, even though he be a child of Nature and part of her—“Nature’s insurgent son.” But some reflec-tion on the facts of certain provinces of science affords ample justifica-tion for the method. It is chiefly in questions of origin that it avails, while it fails in that form of research by experiment which is the glory of modern science. A few examples of the process of passing from the known to the unknown will illustrate the method.
Darwin.

Much of the Origin of Species and all of the Descent of Man was founded on this method; thus in the former the conceptions of struggle took their main rise from the work of Malthus on Human Popula-tion, and of variation from domesticated animals and plants, and this is true also of Wallace. A mere glance at the divisions of The Descent of Man shows that it could never have been attempted in any other than the backward way.

Geology.

In their researches on the crust of the earth Playfair, Hutton and Lyell did not pursue them by going down a coal mine till they came to the lowest available beds and work upward from these to the highest. Though for purposes of exposi-tion a great geologist, as Sir Archibald Geikie, may expound the making of the earth from the lowest to the highest levels, and Professor Bonney tell us the Story of our Planet from beginning to end as if he had watched it unfolding, Lyell in his Principles of Geology shows how the studies of his great province began. There we have the backward reading of its story pursued by himself and other great ones, and where it led them. Commencing with the Pleistocene period and passing through Neocene and Eocene periods through the Mesozoic Era and its cretaceous, jurassic and triassic systems to the Newer Pal?ozoic Era and its Permian, carboniferous, and Devonian systems, the older Pal?ozoic Era and its Silurian Ordovician and Cambrian systems, he reaches the unknown. But before all this patient research and its record is reached he treats, as he must, of consolida-tion and altera-tion of strata, of petrifica-tion of organic remains, elevation of strata, horizontal and inclined stratifica-tion, of faulting, denuda-tion, upheaval and subsidence as they combine to remodel the earth’s crust. The title of his classical work is significant—An Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth’s Surface by Reference to Causes now in Operation (it may be noted that in 1830 they were fond of capital letters and of underlining their words). If these great men had been condemned to the sole use of the method of the annalist in his treatment of human history, that of the coal mine in geology, this great province of knowledge would never have been what it is to-day.

At this point I think it well to state that this illuminating principle of Lyell is pursued in nearly all the matters of fact and their interpreta-tion contained in the following chapters, so that from time to time I shall have to employ the verb, coined for the purpose, when I attempt to “Lyell” them on behalf of Lamarck.
Anthropology.

The anthropologist could hardly make a start with his research, if, knowing nothing of his own anatomy, physiology, customs and beliefs, he tried to interpret the physical features, habits, manners, customs and rites of an African tribe. Without such prior knowledge he would find it a profitless task to journey to the banks of the Zambesi and bring back any intelligible history of the aborigines. If he did not know the games of a European child how could he
understand the variants of them such as the writer of Savage Childhood2 expounds so well?
The Sources of Rivers.

To trace the course and source of a river is a simple task through the work of modern geographers, and such a pursuit illustrates well the two methods here considered, but it is doubtful if any river was ever traced originally from its fountain head to its mouth. The backward way of such explora-tion, from the nature of the case, has always been taken, and men have traced the more or less finished products of the lower stretches, backward, still backwards, even as in the Indus, to the still-unknown. The earliest thinkers and seekers in the plains of Bengal were familiar with much of their great sacred and composite river as it flowed into its delta. Slowly, laboriously, here a little and there a little, they learned its stupendous story. They found the plateau of Tibet in the Himalayas where the twin-sisters, Brahmaputra and Ganges were born, and saw how from the one high cradle they parted on their eastward course for a thousand miles with the mountain-chain between them, and how, coming together again, the one descending through Assam and the other flowing through the plains, reinforced by the Jumna, they united to form the Ganges-Brahmaputra. A great subject indeed for the early geographer, but one which he could only follow in the backward way. Again how well known and revered in Egypt was the Nile for thousands of years before its source in Victoria Nyanza could be traced, even though Nero might send his explorers as far as the marshes of the White Nile, and Ptolemy’s search for it might lead him to guess the riddle, and assign it to two great lakes!
Genealogy.

Not many of us can trace our ancestry in the direct male line to the 8th century by authentic and written documents as did a Hebrew friend of mine, thus effectually meeting the doubts of a prospective brother-in-law who asked him as to his fitness to enter a family which was able to produce a stray peer of the realm in its roll. On the other hand a man who has lost his parents in childhood may know nothing of them but that his father’s name was A. Mann, and that he was buried in a Kentish churchyard. He may go on a pilgrimage and find there recorded the fact that A. Mann was the son of A. Mann, Gent, who came from Northumberland. He will doubtless make another pilgrimage and find there a large vault,
and over it an imposing record of many a Mann, and yet further he may go, and from the Heralds’ College find out the still earlier deriva-tion of his ancestors.
Detection of a Crime.

There are two chief ways of detecting a crime. By oral evidence from eye-witnesses or confession of the accused you may get direct proof, though even here are pitfalls from careless and hasty witnesses on the one hand, or on the other from a strange perversion of mind of the confessing person which is well enough known to forensic medicine. You may thus bring home to the accused his guilt by the method of the annalist. Or you may employ the more common method of studying circumstantial evidence; the story of the crime is read backwards and a verdict of guilty is given. This is the main stuff of which the prevalent detective story is composed.
A Parable.

A plain parable may well conclude this chapter.

As I mused on the chain of life I found a piece of whipcord which had been lying by for twenty-five years since some of it was used for rigging a model yacht, and this very efficient product of human art seemed to speak to me on the subject of my musings. Perhaps if Huxley could extract from a piece of chalk or lumps of coal two magnificent expositions on geology and biology, this little trifle of cord might afford a text on a way of looking at living things which should be useful in this old case of Lamarck v. Weismann—and others.

Should I learn the story of the whipcord forwards like an annalist, or backward like a modern historian? Clearly it could be done in a measure by either method. Here was a highly finished product of which either might furnish the story, and of which, we may suppose, I knew nothing. I tried the backward way, and by the aid of a needle began to unravel it. The cord was as good as if just made, slender, strong, twisted, with some glazing on the twisted threads. It showed three main bundles, and each of these was composed of two smaller ones. The substance of all these six was found when examined with a lens to consist of minute silky fibres varying from a quarter of an inch to an inch in length. This was all I could learn without a stronger magnifying power or a chemical analysis, and the direct search was at an end. I gathered since then that the first three bundles were called “strands,” and the two composing each of these “yarns,” and that the fibres were from a plant called hemp. This did not carry the story deep or far, and illustrates
how often in the backward method facts have to be supplemented by inference. But I had learnt some undoubted facts and some inferences from them nearly as certain. Some mind of man had conceived and hands carried out the division of the bundles of fibres into three strands, had twisted them somehow so as to reduce their length by a quarter and yet not far enough to rupture them, and had thus fitted them the better for their purpose by a reinforcement of tensile strength due to the twisting. I could also see that this same mind had seen it better to divide each of these strands into two yarns before the final twisting, and that in framing the yarns the silky fibres of the plant had been squeezed together by some powerful agency and yet not disintegrated, and that the finished product had been immersed in a protective substance which gave it a slight glaze. In short, I, though a child in these matters, read much of the story of this cord in terms of mind dealing with given organic matter. I may add that I did not imagine myself a little Paley, and that I do not intend to “take in” the reader as to the argument from design and final causes, even though this parable may feebly resemble Paley’s study of a watch. The conclusion was perfectly clear that certain directing grey cells of a certain brain had interfered with and acted upon some plastic vegetable matter, and one could at the “strand” stage, the “yarn” stage, and the “fibre” stage see mind writ large.
The Forward Way.

The limits of the former method are obvious, but I might also attempt to follow the little story as a crime is followed and described by eye-witnesses. So I go to an old-fashioned rope-factory and ask the foreman questions about the making of twine, cords, ropes and cables. He shows me bundles of hemp; he calls them Russian, Italian or American, and goes on to tell me how the fibre is “heckled” or combed, how “tow” is separated from “line,” and how the yarns are pressed together and twisted, how they are at first rough and bristly, and are then dressed, polished, and “sized” with such a starch as that of the potato. When I proceed to ask him about the plant itself his interest flags, and he becomes vague. He says, “You had better ask the Head, young Mr. X., he knows these things better.” I find the Head with his golf clubs over his shoulder and about to start on his “business,” and he is polite, but says he knows very little about the origin of his hemp. “You should go over the way and ask Messrs. Y. if they will let you see the expert who advises them in their business, he will know.” The expert is at home and kindly and fully describes to me the early home of
the wild Cannabis Sativa in a moderate climate of Asia, the rich soil it needs for its growth and the various countries of the world into which it has been introduced; and the bast-fibres of the bark of this plant which from remote antiquity has supplied the silky stuff. He then tells me how the stems are dried and crushed, and then of the important stage of fermenta-tion or “retting” in water, how they are again beaten in a “break,” then rubbed and “scutched,” and finally “heckled” or combed; and, as to analytic chemistry, he tells me that the chief constituent is cellulose. This quest is now over and I know much I could not find out by the backward method, though the dependence of its rival upon the presence of honest and capable eye-witnesses is not less obvious. It is not alone in ecclesiastical history that cheats and forgers of documents exist. In the world of Nature there may be, for all we know, biological False Decretals that may lead us far astray, such perhaps as Amphioxous and Arch?opteryx, and the Pseudo-Isidore who produced them may yet be discovered.
CHAPTER II. REVIEW OF THE POSITION
The modern story of the theory of organic evolution shows certain important dates—1859, 1880, 1894, 1895, 1899 and 1909. These begin with the Origin of Species and end with the publica-tion of a volume in commemora-tion of its jubilee, when most of the leading students of evolution united to render homage to Darwin. The year 1859 has been so often and so worthily treated that it is enough here to say that the fifty years between the issue of the work of Darwin and Wallace and 1909 saw a greater revolu-tion in biology, speculative and practical, than any period so relatively brief had ever seen.

In the year 1880 the “coming of age” of the Origin of Species was celebrated. On the 9th of April at the Royal Institu-tion an address was given by the powerful friend, champion and candid critic of Darwin, and before the scientific and educated world Huxley was able to say with his own force and directness: “Evolution is no longer an hypothesis, but an historical fact.” It may be noted in passing that Darwin’s theory of natural selection is not referred to in the address. Challenges and opposi-tion from various quarters met this confident claim of the formidable speaker, as doubtless he desired, but the work of the succeeding half-century has done little or nothing that does not establish that claim. It is hardly to be doubted that if in the jubilee-year, 1909, Huxley had been alive on this earth, instead of elsewhere, his eloquent voice would have been heard to declare with emphasis equal to that of 1880: “Selection is no longer an hypothesis, but an historical fact.” Some such statement, with the imprimatur of a great name would have removed from the jubilee-volume that slight aspect as of a Dutch chorus3 which is apparent in it. A remark of Kelvi
n’s when he was conferring a medal of the Royal Society on Huxley may illustrate what has been said above. He said that they must all be thankful to have still among them that champion of Evolution who once bore down its enemies, but was now possibly needed to save it from its friends. It may be regretted that it was not so in 1909.

Considering the mole-like and persistent work of the biometricians, some who are at present keeping well-ordered lawns may find some day a few disturbing heaps of facts. I am reminded here of an historic duel, Oxford v. Cambridge, which took place soon after the introduc-tion of Mendel’s discoveries into England at the London Zoological Society, when Prof. Bateson expounded them with enthusiasm and when Weldon repelled them with cogent and incisive arguments. The duel lasted nearly two hours and that was not too long for the audience, but one has the impression that some of what Professor Thomson calls muddleheadedness must have been somewhere existing. However, the duel was fought when Mendelism was young.
Three Blows to Darwin.

But other historic events are more relevant to my immediate purpose than these.

Three blows were delivered against Darwinism in the years 1894, 1895 and 1899 by Prof. Bateson, Weismann, and again Prof. Bateson, under which it seemed to reel, but from which it is more than likely it has derived but greater strength.

Bateson.

In 1894 Prof. Bateson published his large and important work, Materials for the Study of Variation. As a distinguished student and teacher of biology he found the received doctrine of evolution in straits as regards the factor of natural selection in producing specific differences, as indeed happened to another equally eminent man during the next year. He was profoundly discontented as to the origin of specific differences on the theory of direct utility of variations, and he said “on our present knowledge the matter is talked out.”4 He threw over the study of adapta-tion “as a means of directly solving the problem of species.” He came to the conclusion “Variation is Evolution,” and affirmed that the readiest way of solving the problem of evolution is to study the facts of variation. Hence arose this notable book, and hence one of his trenchant statements to the effect “that the existence of new forms having from their beginning more or less of the kind of perfec-tion that we associate with normality, is a fact that once and for all disposes of the attempt to interpret all perfec-tion and definiteness of form as the work of selection,”5 and “Inquiry into the causes of variation is as yet, in my judgment, premature.”6 It will hardly be denied that a work which contained such statements as these from such a source seemed momentous in its influence on the fate of Darwin’s theory. Prof. Bateson yielded to none in his loyalty to Darwin, as far as he knew himself, and here he is as candid as Huxley, and he declares that in his treatment of the phenomena of variation is found nothing which is in any way opposed to Darwin’s theory. The shade of Darwin might nevertheless have looked with some misgiving at this man over against him with a drawn sword in his hand, and have asked gently, “Art thou for us or for our adversaries?” Prof. Bateson’s work chiefly requires to be considered here because to any reader of it there must come the convic-tion on the one hand of Prof. Bateson’s merits and power, and on the other of his limita-tion as a student of organic evolution. In 1894 is evident already an exclusive attention to structure rather than function, to anatomy than physiology; the anatomical leaven in doctrine has leavened the whole lump. For him physiology of animals and plants does not exist, or at the best is the outcome of structures which arise through variation and selection. This, if I may say so, is as much his strength as his weakness. There have been other great biologists, such as Geoffrey Saint-
Hilaire and Richard Owen, of whom this is true. If that were all one would not wish the reader to be troubled with any criticism of one’s betters, indeed such remarks as are here made do not amount to criticism at all, but just plain text-book statements. It is also evident that the outlook of Prof. Bateson was being prepared for a revela-tion which had not yet come, in which he took a prominent, if not dominant part, I mean the great rediscovery of Mendel’s work by de Vries, Correns and Tschermak and himself in England. His keen and close attention to anatomical structures was preparing his mind for the germinal conceptions of unit-characters, dominance and segrega-tion. The intensive cultiva-tion of the fertile field of genetics proceeded apace, and Prof. Bateson in his contribu-tion to the jubilee-volume of 1909 betrayed the trend of his devotion to a system of distribu-tion rather than formation of the qualities of an organism. The organism as an historical functioning, striving being, had receded once for all from his vision. He hazarded the sugges-tion in Heredity and Variation in Modern Lights that “variation consists largely in the unpacking and repacking of an original complexity,” and that “it is not so certain as we might like to think that the order of these events is not predetermined.” Incidentally one may remark that, malgré lui, Prof. Bateson stands forth as a modern Paley as does Weismann in his great rival and opposing scheme. It is true that he says “I see no ground whatever for holding such a view, but in fairness the possibility should not be forgotten and in the light of modern research it scarcely looks so absurdly improbable as before.” Having drawn the sword he threw away the scabbard in 1914 when he occupied the presidential chair of the British Associa-tion of Science at Melbourne and Sydney. He had said in 1894 in his book on variation as stated before, “Inquiry into the causes of variation is as yet, in my opinion, premature,” and then in 1914 at Melbourne, after twenty more years of study of the subject in the Mendelian direction, “It is likely that the occurrence of these variations is wholly irregular, and as to their causation we are absolutely without surmise or even plausible specula-tion.” (my italics).7 So, on this fundamental point, he stands where he did when he began the study of variation, but apart from this point he again threw out his sugges-tion of 1909 as to the unpacking and repacking of an original complexity. At Melbourne he said, “Lotsy has lately with great courage suggested to us that all variation may be due to such crossing. I do not disguise my sympathy with this effort.”8 All variation! He said later, “In spite of seeming per
versity, therefore, we have to admit that there is no evolutionary change which in the present state of our knowledge we can positively declare not due to loss.”9 (Italics mine.) These two statements of 1914 are enough to show that the biologist of 1894, 1899, 1909 and 1914 has evolved in a definite line, and it is to his honour that he has remembered “to thine ownself be true.” But he is not so true to himself in his scorn of those who propound theories. For myself I would give little for the biologist who did not hold or propound some theory. What was the penultimate and stirring message of the gifted G. B. Howes? “We live by ideas, we advance by a knowledge of the facts.” The self-denying ordinance affirmed and reaffirmed by Prof. Bateson is not observed even in the Melbourne and Sydney addresses. In the former, he says “at first it may seem rank absurdity to suppose that the primordial form or forms of protoplasm could have contained complexity enough to produce the divers types of life,” and asks us to open our minds to this possibility. Again “I have confidence that the artistic gifts of mankind will prove to be due not to something added to the makeup of an ordinary man, but to the absence of factors which in the normal person inhibit the development of these gifts.” And at Sydney, “Ages before written history began, in some unknown place, plants, or more likely a plant of wheat lost the dominant factor to which this brittleness is due, and the recessive thrashable wheat resulted. Some man noticed this wonderful novelty, and it has been disseminated over the earth. The original variation may well have occurred once only in a single germ,” and “so must it have been with man.”10

These are three stupendous stretches of imagina-tion and theory in one address, which would have been the poorer if they had not overcome the accomplished speaker’s dislike of the theories—of others. If they are not ideal constructions of a high order I do not know the meaning of that term. They are worthy of Weismann the Prince of ideal constructionists. Prof. Bateson might indeed be another Newton with his Hypotheses non fingo.

Turning to another important biological doctrine one can see what it may be legitimate to call a bi-phyletic parallelism in the biological make-up of Prof. Bateson. Again is seen consistency of view and loyalty to his first love. Two references from these addresses will be enough to introduce the point.

At Melbourne, “We thus reach the essential principle that an organism cannot pass on to offspring a factor which it did not itself receive in fertiliza-tion.”11

At Sydney, “The factors which the individual receives from his parents, and no others, are those which he can transmit to his offspring”12—in other words the doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characters is estopped. As to this he speaks in 1909 more doubtfully on p. 90 and on p. 95 almost dogmatically.13 There is just a convenient haziness of meaning in the term “factor” with which some play might be made, but, taking it to mean what the context indicates, an acquirement made by the individual during its personal life, we have pretty clear evidence that Prof. Bateson will have nothing to do with the inheritance of acquired characters as that doctrine is understood by the unsophisticated biologist. This opposi-tion should be counted unto him for righteousness rather than the reverse, for it falls into line with his life’s work to which he has given of his best.—Vestigia nulla retrorsum. The point reached here which concerns my purpose is that the orthodox Mendelian still knows nothing of the cause or origin of variation, and will have none of Lamarck.

This considera-tion of Prof. Bateson’s work of a quarter of a century has been necessary for showing how the work of Weismann and himself diverge gravely and yet meet at one point, and the year 1899, being linked with 1894, has been taken out of its chronological order.

It may be permitted perhaps to say respectfully to the Mendelians in the words of the dying father in the fable, “Dig, my sons, dig in the vineyard.” If they follow still the course of the sons they may find more gold than they have found already and perchance that which is better than gold. But they will produce from it nothing that is not there.
Two Parables.

Here gentle reader (I seem to remember this style of address in the stories of our youth) pause with me in a little oasis of the desert-stage of our journey, and brush off some of the dust, while I briefly narrate two incidents, but I pray you also not to leave me in the midst of them so that you may escape the next short stage.

A traveller, small and insignificant, armed only with an oak cudgel, was passing alone through a South American forest. As he trudged forward he noticed at a certain point in the path (shall we call it 1894-1899?) that a jaguar was watching him and was about to break his truce with man. He turned off to the right and there he saw a puma and this too
seemed to meditate evil. He hastened forward just in time as his two enemies sprang at him, and these two near relatives were locked in mortal grip—and so he passed on safe!

The reader, naturalist or layman, can point the moral for himself.

At the battle of Trafalgar, while fighting was in full progress on one of the ships, some sailors were occupied in throwing overboard the bodies of those who had been killed. A poor Scotchman badly wounded and hardly conscious was taken up by two seamen, an Englishman and an Irishman, and as they were about to throw him overboard his feeble voice was heard to say “I’m no deed yet.” “What’s that?” said the Irishman. “I’m no deed yet”; “Arrah, the doctor said he was dead, over wid him,” said the Irishman.
Weismann.

During the period 1894-1899 there was a dramatic proclama-tion on the part of one of the greatest living biologists, which was, in the cosmos of biology, what the Proclama-tion of the Empress-Queen of India was in 1876, and it is not out of place to remind the reader that the fates of the two Imperial utterances have been somewhat different. In 1895 Weismann issued his official statement of doctrine which was to crown the work of his life, an essay on Germinal Selection. From Freyburg in November, 1895, he wrote a preface to his address delivered on September 16th in that year to the International Congress of Zoologists at Leyden. This formed an epoch in biological thought and there lived none so well qualified as Weismann to stand forth as its interpreter. The well-translated, forcible language, and lucid thought leave the reader in no manner of doubt as to his meaning. It took a wider form in his final book on the Evolution Theory, but the germinal and essential thoughts of the latter were contained in the former. From 1895 onwards the praise of Weismann was in all the churches. Probably no modern worker in the fields of heredity and evolution has done so much as Weismann towards raising great issues and removing some ancient misconceptions; but it is one thing to raise great issues and another to solve them. In this he has signally failed, nevertheless biological theory would be the poorer if he had not made the attempt. Reflec-tion, the work of other biologists, and the remorseless hand of time have shaken the edifices then raised. I will here only bring forward a few of the most illuminating passages of the 1895 essay, and then refer to the handling of Weismann’s work by Romanes.

This trenchant essay contains fifty-seven pages, of which reasoning forms the greater part. As to the facts it might well pass for an essay from Professor Poulton’s pen, for Weismann’s special province of insects occupies nearly all the evidence from facts. Outside this highly specialised group there are exactly fifty-three lines, or one and a half pages, which deal with other animal groups, and there are four casual allusions to plants occupying twelve lines in all! In the essay of 1909 on the Selection Theory this treatment of animated life in the world is improved upon and thirteen out of its forty-seven pages refer to animals outside his favourite group of insects. Such exclusive dealing with these little things does not commend the reasoning, at any rate to a neo-Lamarckian; such a circle is too select for him.
Weismann’s Twelve Points.

The most striking remarks from the 1895 essay on germinal selection are:—

1. “The real aim of the present essay is to rehabilitate the principle of selection. If I should succeed in reinstating this principle in its imperilled rights, it would be a source of extreme satisfac-tion to me.”14

2. Speaking of the whole theory of selection he claimed to have found a position “which is necessary to protect it against the many doubts which gathered around it on all sides like so many lowering thunder-clouds.”15 And he speaks on page 26 of “the flood of objections against the theory of selection touching its inability to modify many parts at once.”

Thus Weismann stood forth to defend the crumbling edifice of Darwinism and threw his shining sword into the scales, a scientific Athanasius “contending for our all.” Again is seen a friend of Darwin from another camp than that of Mendel, whose support needs to be received with some caution. Toujours en vedette is a useful rule.

3. Speaking of adaptedness in animated nature he says, “We know of only one natural principle of explana-tion for this fact—that of selection.”16

4. “Germinal selection is the last consequence of the applica-tion of the principle of Malthus to living nature.”17

5. “Without doubt the theory (Germinal Selection) requires that the initial steps of a variation should also have selective value.”18

6. “Something is still wanting in the theory of Darwin and Wallace which it is obligatory on us to discover if we possibly can. We must seek to discover why it happens that useful variations are always present.”19

7. “It is impossible to do without the assump-tion that the useful variations are always present, or that they always exist in a sufficiently large number of individuals for the selective process.”20

8. “Some profound connexions must exist between the utility of a variation and its actual appearance, or the direction of the variation of a part must be determined by utility.”21

9. That “germinal selection performs the same services for the understanding of observed transformations . . . that a heredity of acquired characters would perform without rendering necessary so violent an assump-tion!”22 (Italics mine.)

10. Weismann speaks warmly of Professor Lloyd Morgan for his caution and calmness of judgment but complains of him that he “has not been able to abandon completely the heredity of acquired characters.”23

11. As to passive effects of environment, etc., he says “the Lamarckian principle is here excluded ab initio.”24

12. “It seems to me that a hypothesis of this kind (Lamarckism) has performed its services and must be discarded the moment it is found to be at hopeless variance with the facts.”25

I have only to add here that several years ago I wrote to Weismann drawing his attention to some facts I had observed which seemed to me to be instances of use-inheritance, and I received a reply in polite but brief and Prussian terms to the effect that the facts referred to must be capable of some other interpreta-tion, for the machinery for their transmission did not exist.

Each of these twelve quotations from Weismann’s essay is important from the present point of view, and shows how far neo-Darwinians are likely to promote the greater glory of Darwin, and though more than a quarter of a century elapsed between this essay and his death Weismann was not the man to have repudiated any of these strong statements.
Lighthouse Value.

I hope at this point a small digression is not out of place in order to introduce an aspect of Weismann’s work which is not usually appreciated. A child is aware of the great and lesser lights that rule the day and night, but for modern man these are not
sufficient. Accordingly he has invented from immemorial times his oil lamps, rushlights, tallow and wax candles, gas and electric light for the illumina-tion of his streets and houses. Prehistoric man did not seem to need them, as he thought. These useful examples of applied knowledge were obviously brought into use for showing man better where he was going and where to go, what he was doing and what he wished to see. I hope this trite remark may be pardoned, for there is another form of light which suits my purpose of illustrating the aspect of Weismannism referred to above, that is the light of a lighthouse. The ancients in their crude way saw the need for this and as far back as the days of Ptolemy II. a tower to give light was erected on the island of Pharus, off the Egyptian coast, and it was called a pharos. Man found it necessary, as naviga-tion and seafaring advanced, to use this principle more and more, and on headland, sandbank and rugged coast has built noble structures to aid the sailor in his dangerous course. The oldest and finest of these in Great Britain is the Eddystone lighthouse, built first in 1695 by Winstanley and finally by Smeaton in 1756-9. For what reason is a lighthouse built and placed where it is? For the precisely opposite reason to that of the domestic candle. While this shows you where to go and how better to do your immediate business, a lighthouse is for the main purpose of showing a mariner where he should not go. It has no relation to adornment or pleasure. It does not invite you to come in your vessel and admire it. It tells you to go away and avoid the sunken rock or treacherous sands.

I submit here the sugges-tion with all deference, that the final work of Weismann has lighthouse value of a high order, as to the modus operandi of evolution. His greatness as a biologist, his candour and skill in dialectics, have built up a veritable lighthouse which may usefully warn the seeker after the path of evolution that he must turn elsewhere if he would not founder upon a reef of facts.

The two great contributions to evolutionary thought that Weismann has made should be considered separately, the theory of germ-plasm and that of evolution, though the latter seems to be the necessary outcome of the former. But the truth of Weismann’s view of heredity does not of necessity require the error of his theory of evolution.
Romanes on Weismann.

For this study the examina-tion of Weismannism by Romanes published in 1893 is of great value. I need only refer here to the main conclusions of that lucid and learned examina-tion.

Weismann’s work on the germ-plasm in pursuance of a theory of heredity is pronounced by Romanes to have remained up to 1893 substantially unaltered, though largely added to in matters of detail, and at the present time as far as I gather from a study of the more recent literature this theory holds the field or at least a commanding position in it.26 Originally he held that the germ-plasm possessed perpetual continuity since the first origin of life, and absolute stability since the first origin of sexual propaga-tion, but he has shown himself willing to surrender the first postulate, and has himself altered the second. As it stands now it must be admitted that the continuity of the germ-plasm is an interrupted continuity with the appearance of every inherited change; the continuity is theoretical, not actual, and the stability of the germ-plasm is not absolute but of a high degree. We can thus see in the story of this original theory of heredity the lighthouse value of the pharos of Ptolemy II.

It is far otherwise with Weismann’s theory of evolution. Romanes shows that with the removal of its essential postulate the absolute stability of germ-plasm, Weismann’s theory of evolution falls to the ground. He has indeed surrendered much in his later building, his second temple of Solomon, and prominent among these was the claim that the only causes of individual variation
and of the origin of species in the uni-cellular organisms are the Lamarckian factors, just as in the multicellular the only cause of these is natural selection. Thus we see standing at the critical date, 1892, the first Eddystone lighthouse of Winstanley, a greater and more important structure than the old pharos.
Germinal Selection.

It can hardly be doubted that one of the “thunderclouds” threatening Darwinism, of which Weismann spoke in 1895, was this examina-tion of Weismannism by Romanes. As the case stood then some fresh strategy was needed if victory for Darwin was to be won, at least so the great leader said. It must be remembered that it was the personal selection of Darwin which was held to be in danger. Accordingly germinal selection was brought forth and remained the basis of Weismann’s later Evolution Theory of 1904 and 1909. Romanes did not live to see or assist in the disproof of this ambitious piece of work so that his “examina-tion” is so far incomplete.

The position of germinal selection is defined in Weismann’s statement that “it is the adaptive requirement itself that produces the useful direction of variation by means of selectional processes within the germ.” Here it is in a nutshell. The theory itself is consistent, and clearness has been added to the earlier evolution theory by the claim that a struggle for nutriment occurs within the fertilised ovum between the innumerable determinants of the different parts, so that maintenance or victory over weaker determinants takes place. Thus we have a survival of the fittest in petto in the germ analogous to that of the individual organisms as we see them. There is of course a resemblance here to the cellular or histonal selection of Roux, but his doctrines are not weighted with the intolerable dogma of the non-inheritance of acquired characters. But ultimately this concep-tion of germinal selection has to come down and bow to the tribunal of facts, and the remark of Weismann on Lamarckism which has been already quoted, “It seems to me that an hypothesis of this kind has performed its service and must be discarded the moment it is found to be at hopeless variance with the facts,” confronts the consistent Weismannian. And I venture to say here that germinal selection is represented by the Eddystone lighthouse of 1756-9 erected by Smeaton.

The grounds for this statement are afforded by numerous facts and experiments, to which in the later chapters I propose to add a few fresh ones, and by a growing body of opinion and authority in favour of Lamarckian factors in evolution.

Three “lighthouses” of this metaphorical sort have thus been afforded by the work of Weismann, represented by the Pharos of old, Winstanley’s Eddystone lighthouse and that of Smeaton.
Authority.

We have then Weismann and Professor Bateson definitely ranged against the position taken in this volume as to a cause or origin or variation and the inheritance of acquired characters. To these we must add the great weight of Sir E. Ray Lankester’s opinion lately given in a reply to Professor Adami that “it is very widely admitted (more correctly “claimed”) that no case of the transmission of what are called acquired characters from parent to offspring has been demonstrated in so far as those higher animals and plants which multiply by means of specialised egg-cells and sperm-cells are concerned.”

It is not necessary to mention more than these “three mighties” of the biological world.

Many others such as Prof. J. Arthur Thomson and Prof. W. K. Brooks, of Johns Hopkins University, are still unconvinced as to Lamarckian factors and ask for more evidence, and they have many to support them in their opinion and claim. There is often a tone of weariness, as well as wariness in their remarks on the matter.

In favour of the neo-Lamarckian position, with which stands or falls the suggested cause of variation, there is a growing body of opinion, with the mention of which I conclude this review.

1. The accomplished writer of Form and Function, Mr. E. S. Russell, says the theory of Lamarck “although it had little influence upon biological thought during and for a long time after the lifetime of its author, is still at the present day a living and developing doctrine.”27

2. Sir Francis Darwin from the Presidential Chair of the British Associa-tion of Science in Dublin in 1908 proclaimed his adherence to the mnemonic theory of heredity, foreshadowed by Samuel Butler and inaugurated by Semon, a condition of which is that acquired characters are inherited. This caused much stir in the camp of “our friends the enemy.”

3. Observations and experiments at variance with germinal selection and its negative presupposi-tion have been rapidly accumulated from the work of botanists and zoologists who were prepared to appeal to the tribunal of natural processes; though Weismann and some of his followers, with some reason, look upon the evidence from plants as a weak link in the chain of evidence.
Many of the observations and experiments are well-known and only a mere mention of them need be made here, they are such as Mr. J. T. Cunningham’s observations on the effect of light on the under surface of flounders, Kammerer’s on the changes in the colour of salamanders to surrounding objects, and others by him on certain amphibia and reptiles especially alytes held by Professor McBride to be convincing, though the latter are to be repeated at the London Zoological Society’s gardens and are therefore sub judice—others on brine-shrimps, on the effects of change of food on bee-grubs and tadpoles, and of the change of level of environments of certain cereals—others by Henslow on plants which have never been refuted, and many by the late Prince Kropotkin. The latter have appeared at length in certain issues of the Nineteenth Century in September 1901, March 1912, October 1914, and the last in January 1919, and they deal both with plants and animals, and are too numerous to be mentioned here individually.

Again, Professor Dendy as President of the Zoological Section of the British Associa-tion of Science in September, 1914, devoted most of his address to the subject of Lamarckism and firmly claimed as a necessary factor of evolution “the direct response of the organism to environmental stimuli at all stages of development, whereby individual adapta-tion is secured, and this individual adapta-tion must arise again and again in each succeeding genera-tion.” He also maintains this position in several passages in his important work Outlines of Evolutionary Biology published in 1912.

A statement by Professor Bower, President of the Botanical section of the British Associa-tion of Science in 1914 should also be noted: “I share it (the doctrine in question) in whole or in part with many botanists, with men who have lived their lives in the atmosphere of observa-tion and experiment found in large botanical gardens and not least with a former President of the British Associa-tion, viz., Sir Francis Darwin.”

Professor Adami, in 1917, published an original work called Medical Contributions to the Study of Evolution in which from his extensive knowledge of the subject he deals with evidence of inheritance of acquired characters in lowly organisms as well as higher animals from the point of view of pathology.

Enough has been stated here to show that the dogma of Weismann or Lamarckian factors in organic evolution, qua authority, has been in poor case during recent years, and it remains for me now to add my small quota of the authority of facts.
CHAPTER III. THE PROBLEMS PRESENTED.
In his classical work on Heredity, Professor J. Arthur Thomson exhausts the evidence on Lamarckism available then (1908) in a manner worthy of the summing-up of an English judge. This is presented to the jury of the biological world and they are still considering it. Their verdict and his sentence are not yet delivered, and it may be they will still be long delayed. One might almost use the words of Professor Bateson, previously quoted, “on our present knowledge the matter is talked out.”

I will make one prophecy in this volume and predict that the fourth edition of this work in 1930 will contain the verdict of the jury and sentence of the distinguished judge to the effect that in the case Lamarck v. Weismann the plaintiff has won. As in the Great War the Old Contemptibles held their line with the utmost difficulty against the disciplined hosts of the greatest army ever known till then, and yet the latter found their First Battle of the Marne, so perchance it may be in the present struggle.

I introduce this chapter with an important passage from the above work on the Logical position of the Argument, in which the two possible methods of establishing the affirmative position of Lamarck are given; these are, first, actual experimental proof of transmission, and, second, a collec-tion of facts which cannot be interpreted without the hypothesis of modifica-tion inheritance. The words are:28 “The neo-Lamarckians have to show that the phenomena they adduce as illustrations of modifica-tion-inheritance cannot be interpreted as the results of selection operating on germinal variations. In order to do this to the satisfac-tion of the other side, the neo-Lamarckians must prove that the characters in question are outside the scope of natural selection, that they are non-utilitarian and not correlated with any useful characters—a manifestly difficult task. The neo-Darwinians, on the other hand, have to prove that the phenomena in question cannot be the results of modifica-tion-inheritance. And this is in most cases impossible.”29

I have placed this passage in italics because of its importance from the point of view of the two problems which I am presenting and would remark here that if only all the writers had used Professor Thomson’s term “modifications” instead of “characters” in the statement of this doctrine much confusion and evasion of plain facts would have been avoided, and yet such workers as the Mendelians, if deprived of their clear-cut term “characters” would have been less able to carry on their studies. To this point of terminology I refer below.30

In a world teeming with the life of plants and animals, and in the branch of science which seeks to interpret them, where we enter upon the unknown much sooner than in any other sphere of science, Weismann has set out to prove or maintain the most stupendous negative ever framed by the human mind. It would require generations of men to prove this negative, if it were probable, and his case rests mainly on the assumed weakness of his opponents. So what is needed and demanded from the neo-Lamarckians is the produc-tion of a few well-attested and verified facts, and, as he admits himself, then it must follow as the night the day that his followers will surrender his characteristic dogma. The more cautious leaders and teachers of the day say that this has not taken place and ask for facts, more facts and still more facts, and this attitude is both judicious and judicial, for example in a teacher so eminent as Professor J. Arthur Thomson. Scientific men, in such a position as he occupies with grace and distinc-tion, owe a serious debt of loyalty to ultimate truth and to the inquiring minds of the young students of to-day and to-morrow. Those who are in a position of inferior responsibility and honour, and more freedom, just rank and file members of the Commons’ House of Parliament, may be pardoned if they do not exhibit an excess of deference to authority and if they think for themselves.
Two Questions.

There are before the Scientific jury to-day two very vivid questions.

(1) Can modifications in the structure of an individual organism, occurring as a result of its experience, be transmitted?

(2) What is the cause of variation?

If, as Weismann taught, the answer to No. 1 is in the negative, there is little use here in trying to answer No. 2, for from the present point of view the two stand or fall together in the study of Initiative in Evolution. Such distributional answers to No. 2 as Bateson and de Vries may offer do not concern my purpose.

If No. 1 be answered in the affirmative it is sufficient for the purpose of treating initial variations from the Lamarckian standpoint, for it is hardly conceivable that Nature would neglect so simple and obvious a method of leading upwards and onwards the organisms that inhabit a changing world.

It is very clear from what is written on the subject of evolution to-day that a point d’appui in the process is earnestly desired by many workers and that Weismann’s dogma stops the way. A very significant and important remark is made by Professor W. McDougall
in his small book on Physiological Psychology, with reference to the inheritance of acquired characters, that it is a “proposi-tion which most biologists at the present time are inclined to deny because they cannot conceive how such transmission can be effected. Nevertheless the rejection of this view leaves us with insuperable difficulties when we attempt to account for the evolution of the nervous system, and there are no established facts with which it is incompatible.”31 I am aware that in the scheme of observed nature there is evidence of no iron necessity, that the convenience of psychologists should be provided for, and they, like others of us, have to do the best they can with the tools and the materials which exist, and I agree with Professor Thomson in his remark on Misunderstanding No. 1, “that our first business is to find out the facts of the case, careless whether it makes our interpreta-tion of the history of life more or less difficult,”32 but I am persuaded that he will not treat lightly such a statement, from such a source, on such a subject as that I have quoted from Professor McDougall. As to his second statement on the same page “that in the supply of terminal variations, whose transmissibility is unquestioned, there is ample raw material for evolution” it is important as an opinion, and no more, and there is in the present connec-tion, an elusiveness about it which prevents one allowing it to pass. It should be noted that stress is laid upon the term “variations” and from the context this means congenital full-blown “characters” such as those that Weismann says are provided in the germ guided by selection. At any rate, initial modifications are not signified by Professor Thomson’s remark. So for evolution of forms of life it is possible the assertion may be true, but apart from distribu-tion of variations, under the process called amphimixis, some starting point is required for the initial and wholly useless stages of many variations. These may or may not become “characters” or adaptive.
What the Problems are not.

The ground may be cleared here by saying what our problems are not. There is no question as to whether Lamarckism or Darwinism represents the predominant partner in the story of life; there is no question of the “relative importance of natural selection and the Lamarckian factors in organic evolution,” though such a question may arise when once Lamarckism has received its passport from the authorities; but the time is not yet. Nor is it a question as to the reason why adaptive modifications are so constantly
present in the germ. It is not a question of Nature or Nurture, but perhaps may be found to be a study of Nature and Nurture. It is not a question of Mendelian analysis, nor as to the distribu-tion of either mutations on the one hand, nor of minute fluctuating variations on the other. The problems are therefore limited in scope and ambition, and are none the worse for that, as being better open to correc-tion or support.
The Problems Considered.

It seems but natural to most persons who contemplate with any care the ever-changing and progressive drama of life in plants and animals that unquestionably the dramatis person? by their individual response to the environments and exercise of their functions must contribute a share, however small, to their offspring. When first this view presents itself to their minds they resent as “unnatural” any other possibility. But, alas! they find that such a conclusion is not permitted in those regions where alone the white light of science shines. Here the writ of a priori does not run. The spirit of inquiry makes its challenge to every presupposi-tion and every assertion in its province—even those of current science. I have shown that this particular assump-tion of the natural man was firmly challenged by Weismann, who was not the first, but the greatest, biologist to teach that modifications are not transmitted. Accordingly, agreeable and convenient as it would be to assume the Lamarckian hypothesis as a working one, it needs in the present day to be supported by evidence before this can be allowed. Facts, then, against Weismann’s dogma are demanded and of such a kind as will satisfy so powerful an advocate of his own views. In passing it may be remarked again that there is nothing so misleading as facts, except statistics, and for both sides to bear in mind the warning of a French writer that in such inquiries as this we should be careful lest we find the facts for which we are looking.

To meet the conditions laid down in Professor Thomson’s Canon I propose to describe certain phenomena which are adduced as instances of modifications in certain mammals whose structure and mode of life are intimately known, and whose ancestry is little in dispute.33 The most convincing of these lines of evidence are those which are shown to be outside the range of any form of selection, as well as the distributional factors of Mendel and
de Vries. It is well to enumerate here the six different factors in organic evolution which might claim a share in the produc-tion of such humble phenomena as form the subject-matter of this volume—they are:

1. Personal Selection of Darwin.
2. Sexual Selection.
3. Histonal or Cellular Selection of Roux.
4. Germinal Selection.
5. Inheritance according to Mendelian principles.
6. Inheritance of Mutations.

There is a somewhat severe and ill-defined condition attached to the formula in question for it demands that such modifications as will satisfy the neo-Darwinians shall not be correlated with any useful character.34 If such a conditio sine qua non were taken too literally it would at once foreclose the case as to the possibility of transmission of modifications at all, the questions of issue ought in that case never to have been raised—and, cadit qu?stio. This cannot be the intention of the biologist who propounds the formula. It could not reasonably be carried so far as to insist that a modifica-tion arising from a certain habit, active or passive, in an animal, and which on that account, and on paper, may loosely be said to be ‘correlated’ with it, is to be ruled out. That would be tantamount to saying for example, that, because an animal must lie down in a certain attitude when it rests, or walk or run in a certain manner, in other words that it is useful to exist, certain modifications claimed to be due to these fundamental parts of existence must be excluded from the inquiry. The neo-Darwinian is not a critic easy to be entreated, but that he would not claim. Let me take one example of what I mean. A short-haired dog will spend a considerable part of its daily life, and presumably a long line of ancestors did so too, lying with its forelegs planted in front of its chest and its head either raised in the air when awake or resting on the upper surface of the forelegs (of course the familiar attitude of a dog with its body and head curled up and fore-legs doubled is not referred to here). If the hairy coat be examined over its neck and jaw, which lie in this attitude, on and against the forelegs, a remarkable reversal of the direction of the hairs is found and the outline of this forms an accurate mould of the surface applied to the forelegs. This is transmitted of course from previous generations of domestic dogs. A precisely analogous reversal of the hairs is found on the under or extensor surfaces of the forelegs, matching with wonderful
exactness the area of pressure of these on the ground, and anyone can see it who has a canine friend of the fox-terrier type. Long-haired dogs display it less neatly outlined. An instance such as this cannot be excluded from the evidence forthcoming because it is correlated with the useful “character” of lying in a certain attitude. Such a phenomenon, many similar to which will be seen later, had at any rate an origin de novo at some time in the ancestral stock, and in some way. To discover these is part of my business. The boldest neo-Darwinian will not claim that this arrangement of a dog’s hair arose by selectional processes within the germ either in the initial or completed stages.
Correlation.

The term “correla-tion” is somewhat scornfully said by Weismann to be “unquestionably a fine word,” and it has indeed in biological writings a very varied set of meanings. I will not vex the reader with a reference to our old friend Mesopotamia, but mention what Dr. Vernon in Variation in Animals and Plants says of the term, referring to the relation between stature and head-index in man: “Such a statement must vary according to the notion of the observer as to what does and what does not constitute correla-tion.”35 The most approved and precise meaning of the loose term in question is that associated with the work of the biometricians, and a few examples from Dr. Vernon’s book will show how far this concep-tion of correla-tion is removed from the literal applica-tion of Professor Thomson’s formula. Dr. Vernon treats of such phenomena as the correla-tion of the long heads of greyhounds with length of legs, contrasting them with the shortened heads and legs of bull-dogs. He describes also the correla-tion in man between the stature and length of forearm from elbow to tip of middle finger, correlated measurements of crabs, of external structures of prawns, the tufts of Polish fowls correlated with perforations in the skull, also certain constitutional peculiarities with colour of skin. These few cases are enough to give an idea of the more precise and fairer accepta-tion of the term, but while these form a useful subject for minute study it may be remarked that they agree also with Lamarckian factors as to their origin and development. They are much more in line with Darwin’s use of the word and are strangely reminiscent of the well-known example of the Irish elk with its great head and horns which was brought forward in favour of Lamarckism by Herbert Spencer. They
breathe an atmosphere of physiology rather than anatomy, or function than form.

Enough has been said here by way of defining the terms of the issue. The negative we have to sustain is that the following facts and observations declare that certain small modifications cannot be governed by selection and are not correlated with useful characters. It will be shown later that Professor Thomson’s stringent condition is not in all of them compiled with, but that, in spite of this, the probability of their being valid examples of Lamarckism in practice is immense.
CHAPTER IV. INITIAL VARIATIONS AND TOTAL EXPERIENCE.
The present chapter is on a priori lines and will perhaps be dismissed with a wave of the hand or hurriedly skimmed over, but I pray the reader at least to read the two or three last pages of it. It is at any rate suggestive, and perhaps I may anticipate the comments of the neo-Darwinian and throw myself on his mercy by mentioning a remark of the late Sir Andrew Clark, prince of physicians and genial cynic, which he made to a patient in my presence. A lady not distinguished for depth of thought asked him a rather silly question in medicine. As if offended he drew himself up, holding in his hand a cup of tea which he was enjoying, and replied at once “Madam, you must get a younger and more inexperienced man than I am to answer you that question.”

A very high degree of probability may be attached to the presupposi-tion that Lamarckian factors, even in their humblest form, may enter into the story of the organisms as historical and living beings. Every hypothesis in matters of science, or, to put it at its lowest, every scientific guess must transcend the evidence at the time available.
Total Experience.

The sugges-tion I venture to make here is that if we take a comprehensive view of certain two great groups of phenomena in nature, which may be termed universal in their extent, it is difficult to conceive that they are not causally connected in the sense that one is the universal antecedent of the other. On the one hand are found universal minute differences, not only between any pair of organisms, but of any two corresponding parts of any organism, even to the size and shape of each leaf on each plant. On the other is universal discontinuity of total experience of all organisms. This term includes all the stimuli of use and environment to which an organism is exposed throughout its whole existence, and its response to them. It includes the whole succession of active and passive stimuli which begin with the formation of a zygote in higher forms, for example, and continue till the death or end of reproductive life of the individual. It stands for such stimuli as arise from
habitat on or in the earth, in various levels of salt or fresh water, in sea, lake, pool and river, and in the branches of trees, from climate, from degrees of light, temperature, moisture and wind, from presence and activity of enemies and rivals, from supplies of food, from geographical and topographical position. Such an enumera-tion of stimuli might be much extended if it would serve any purpose. But it is enough to say that the number of such stimuli, and the varying degrees in which these are received and responded to, have hardly any limit which we can conceive. It is a very different and harder task to find out the propor-tion in which such stimuli are advantageous, injurious or indifferent to the organisms, but it may be taken as certain that the vast majority are indifferent in the sense of producing structural change, and, that the advantageous stimuli transmit structural effects to offspring, is only a matter of very strong probability. If the above two groups of phenomena are not causally connected they are intertwined with remarkable closeness and perversity. This aspect of the “web of life” has received attention, and deserves more.
Discontinuous Environments.

Some reference must be made here to observations of Prof. Bateson in his work on variation. In the first place he makes a most valuable statement that “the environment as the directing cause is essential to Lamarck’s theory and as the limiting cause is essential to the doctrine of Natural Selection”36 (which I venture to place in italics on account of its importance to all who seek the pathway of organic evolution) and points out also that “diversity of environment is thus the measure of diversity of specific form. Here then we meet the difficulty that diverse environments often shade into each other insensibly and form a continuous series.”37 This is clearly true and important to the subjects he is discussing. But in regard to the concep-tion with which I am here concerned, that of total experience of organisms, it must be remembered that there is no such thing as an environment apart from the living beings that it environs, and that from this point of view there is no such thing in the world of nature as a continuous environment. The environment of two am?b? living under a cover-glass is, for them, far from continuous. In their infinitesimal existence the exact position they occupy in the environing drop of fluid, in which the propor-tion of their humble fare at one side of the cover-glass
is not the same as that on the opposite side, renders their environments discontinuous, or different from that of another am?ba occupying a position and “environment” which we should consider identical. And this considera-tion applies to the other few “tropisms” which enter into their little lives. This statement may be difficult to prove, but it is a necessity of thought. An illustra-tion may assist one in visualizing such discontinuity. A fly is seen crawling at its own pace up one of the great pillars of St. Paul’s Cathedral. It comes to one of the thin layers of cement worn down with age and so delicate that a man can just see it in a good light. The fly pauses, and passes into what is for it a chasm, with as much relative delibera-tion as the man would show in passing across a deep railway cutting. The number of pictures that could be made of cases corresponding to that of the am?ba is incalculable. A few will suffice. Two plants of the common nettle are growing on the south side of a ditch in a lane, one rooted a foot higher than the other. The upper one receives throughout its life from wind and sun stimuli slightly different from those received by the lower, and from the soil slightly less moisture. These again receive stimuli very different from another pair on the northern side of the lane. Again in windy weather a clump of sycamores facing the south-west in England, and situated on the ridge of an eminence, will receive very different stimuli from a similar clump on the north-eastern slope of this eminence, and will demonstrate the fact, as to force of wind, by a marked slope to the North East. Even in either of the clumps the individual trees present varying degrees of slope according to their position. The total experience of these two clumps of sycamores and of any two in each clump is obviously different. In a windy situation you can tell in July which is the prevailing wind by noting the main inclina-tion of the ears of corn in a field. Again two male sticklebacks in a pond will make nests for the eggs, there to be deposited, and one will choose a spot on the southern and another on the northern side of a little promontory of soil and stones at the edge of the pond. One will find ready for him materials for building his nest different from those of his rival, and he and his wife and family will receive for that season very different stimuli, and so will the stimuli differ in other phases of their existence in a pond occupying a few square yards. On a sandy bank in a garden facing south you may discover two little caves ingeniously hidden by a small opening, and in each of them you can see a toad. Though these are only a few feet apart one is more widely open to sun and wind than the other and one deeper than the other, and whatever the other activities of the
two toads may be in their little shelters, they receive stimuli different in strength and number. On another bank in the same garden less exposed to view, and altogether more sheltered from sun and wind and enemies, a robin has built a well-hidden nest. If the six fledglings in the nest are watched when the mother is absent they are seen to occupy very different positions of comfort, pressure and warmth. When the mother-bird returns from marketing she is hardly impartial in the amount of food she puts into their open beaks. But the slight and perhaps unimportant inequality of their experiences as fledglings is nothing to that which follows when they fly abroad, and which continues to the end of their lives, the life of a robin being somewhere about ten years long. The differences of the total experience of the six young robins is easy to picture. Again, surely, the total experience of two fleas on the body of one plague-rat must be for such small creatures of importance to their welfare, according as their respective “pitches” are on the abdomen, back or legs of the host. When the life-history of a human being is told in full the discontinuity of his total experience needs no proof. The proof is written large before our eyes. But, perhaps, one example may be given. There are two very eminent living writers, whose light has certainly for some years not been hidden under a bushel, Mr. Chesterton and Mr. George Bernard Shaw. We may be said to know them well. Leaving out of sight the Celtic strain claimed by one, and indeed all inherited differences, we see two men of perhaps equal ability, near of an age, both living in London, both living by their pen, both in easy circumstances. When one considers for a moment the different company these two men keep, their different and opposing outlook on life, their different and opposing forms of diet for their minds and bodies (I know which of the two diets of those men I would choose and with which of them I would prefer to be cast on a desert island) one can only say that the total experience of Mr. Chesterton differs from that of Mr. Shaw as cheese from chalk, which things, incidentally, are an allegory in the philosophy of life.

The thought here briefly expressed falls well into line with Prof. Bateson’s statement that the directing cause of the environment is essential to the theory of Lamarck, and I do not hesitate to add to it the assertion that all environment, in the wide sense of total experience, is discontinuous. There are no such phenomena in total experience as unit-characters of allied forms, small variations are the rule. Without doubt a large propor-tion of the stimuli received by an organism are as figures written on a slate and at once wiped off. They are as the snows of yester year. The most they
do is to contribute in their measure to the metabolism of the organism, being too numerous and minute to affect any structural change. In a higher form of life none but those which are frequently repeated in the individual and in succeeding generations can effect any structural response.
Mould and Sieve.

It will be remembered that a single example was given of a short-haired dog in which its common habit of lying was associated with a certain pattern of hair. This introduces and illustrates the very wide concep-tion of a moulding process undergone by an organism. It is one familiar to biologists and very much so to Professor Thomson in his various writings. Not less is he an exponent of the metaphorical work of the sieve of natural selection. I therefore claim nothing new when, with the temerity of certain persons treading where others are said to fear to do so, I invent an inclusive term and propose to call the two fundamental factors of organic evolution Plasto-diēthēsis38 in which the conceptions of mould and sieve are included and hyphenated. This word is no more proposed for its elegance than are panmixia, amphimixis and tetraplasty, though perhaps it may be the etymological superior of one or more of these. It is at any rate inclusive and perhaps sufficiently audacious to assure the inventor of the title of Dr. Pangloss of controversial memory. But as hard words break no bones I have taken this risk and it would appear to be a convenient “conceptual counter” and even Professor Karl Pearson could not consistently forbid it. It has at any rate the merit of having a meaning clear to all friends and opponents alike of Lamarckism. It will be observed that the two words are placed in what I take to be their natural order as expressive of the Alpha and Omega of the story of organic evolution. The moulding process is claimed to precede that of the sieve, as physiology precedes anatomy and function structure, in that form of biological specula-tion which is held here to be the soundest.39

So the banns between Lamarck and Darwin are published, not for the first time of asking, and who shall say that there is cause or just impediment why these two should not be joined together in holy matrimony?

I conclude this chapter with a passage from the life of Columbus by Washington Irving which affords a fitting parallel from history in the higher development and union of two formerly hostile Kingdoms, and the moral of it is clear and simple. But as a forensic junior I beg to enter a caveat to the effect that though the name of Columbus occurs no sugges-tion is made of the discovery of a New World.

“It has been well observed of Ferdinand and Isabella that they lived together not like man and wife whose estates are in common, under the orders of the husband, but like two monarchs strictly allied. They had separate claims to sovereignty in virtue of their separate Kingdoms, and held separate councils. Yet they were so happily united by common views, common interests, and a great deference for each other, that this double administra-tion never prevented a unity of purpose and action. All acts of sovereignty were executed in both their names; all public writings subscribed with both their signatures; their likenesses were stamped together on the public coin, and the royal seal displayed the united arms of Castile and Aragon.”
CHAPTER V. METHOD OF PROOF.
In a matter of scientific inquiry one cannot go far wrong if one follows the advice of Henri Poincaré, who lays down certain principles of method; four of these are the following:—

(1) The most interesting facts are those which can be used several times, those which have a chance of recurring.

(2) The facts which have a chance of recurring are simple facts.

(3) Method is the selection of facts, and accordingly our first care must be to devise a method.

(4) We should look for the cases in which the rule established stands the best chance of being found fault with.

The groups of facts described in the succeeding chapters are in agreement with these principles in the main, and are perhaps like a dust heap for their intrinsic value. But one knows that before now among a good deal of débris a rusty key has been found which has opened a cabinet containing certain treasures, and in the hands of someone else than the finder has produced useful results.

The headings of the chapters describe the facts, and there is no need to enumerate them here. The first and largest group is studied according to a method which is in a measure applied to all the others. Most of them are external or superficial phenomena and accordingly are open to others beside the expert for observa-tion and corrobora-tion, or the reverse. The typical plan adopted is as follows: a large number of related phenomena are chosen, and the more prominent of these are observed and described. Keeping in mind the two plain issues laid down, the origin of initial modifications and their transmission, I have selected the facts because, especially such as those of the hair, they are very simple, of wide distribu-tion in animals well known to us, such as the domestic horse and man, and none are brought forward which any other observer cannot study for himself if he has some anatomical and physiological knowledge, some training and care in recording observations. In most centres of popula-tion there are still left a good supply of horses in streets and stables, of preserved specimens in museums and living ones in zoological gardens, and of hairy young men who
will hardly refuse a polite request to examine the minute hairs clothing their trunks and limbs. One has to pursue a certain amount of that study which may be called the sister of plant-ecology, that is, animal-ecology or the behaviour of animals at home. The student of these matters, it may be freely admitted, will complain, unless he has some hypothesis or line of thought to follow, that he has been set down in a valley in which the bones are very many and very dry. But, armed or primed with an hypothesis, he may find an affirmative answer to his question “Can these bones live?” Every group of natural phenomena, without exception, has some meaning for those who will interpret nature rather than bully and slight her, and whatever anointed king may claim sovereignty over it the humble fact cannot be denied that “whatever phenomenon is, is.”40 Again I would refer to Howes’ inspiring note: “We live by ideas; we advance by a knowledge of the facts; content to discover the meaning of phenomena, since the nature of things will be for ever beyond our grasp.”41 The facts adduced are simple, have a chance of recurring and are widely distributed among multicellular animals—the botanists and plants can very well take care of themselves. I must once more state that I am attaching to the considered facts a value of a somewhat unusual kind—their intrinsic unimportance. For anyone who has had to encounter the skilful dialectics and counter-attacks of a well-equipped neo-Darwinian it is well that he should remember the maxim of Napoleon, “Be vulnerable nowhere.” It is necessary to show evidence for Lamarckian factors in which no degree of selective value, survival-value, can be seen by hostile sharp-shooter while he works in his trench. The main line of defence, or more correctly what Hindenburg would call “offensive-defence,” is therefore made to rest on the phenomena of hair-direction, which, I submit, are impregnable to the forces of selection, probably in all the hairy mammals, but certainly in that hairy animal called Man.
Thesis.

If these groups of phenomena were being studied apart from the hypothesis they support, a much more full treatment of all of them would be required, such as I have given to those of hair-direction in a book published in 1903 on Direction of Hair in Animals and Man. The limited thesis, however, here upheld is that the phenomena are produced by the factors of stimuli and response in
the course of the total experience of the organism, that the essence of the matter is the produc-tion of initial modifications, that instances of these in well-known animals are produced before our eyes by ascertainable mechanical stimuli, and that, especially in those of hair-direction, experiment is adduced in proof of the thesis that some modifications are transmitted.
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 correla-tion as properly understood.

(6) Experiment in verification of the Lamarckian interpreta-tion 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 Romanes42 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 adapta-tion 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 passage43 adopts it with some reserve and his usual respect for the work of his great co-worker, as the most probable explana-tion 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 connec-tion 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 adapta-tion?”

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.
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 introduc-tion 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 connec-tion between the habits of an animal and the distribu-tion of its hairy coat were always cropping up, and I saw then and see now no possible explana-tion of the connec-tion than that the former is the efficient cause of the latter.
How the Hair is Arranged on the Forearm.

Returning now to the text, the remarkable arrangement of hair on man’s forearm, attention may be directed to the accompanying figure of the forearm of a lemur, an ape and man, in which the extensor or back view of this limb-segment is shown, the heavy “war-arrows” being employed to direct the attention of the reader to the main lines in which the hair-streams flow. The front or flexor surfaces in the lemur and ape are not shown because they are precisely like the corresponding back surfaces, and the flexor surface in man is shown in the figure. The figures are so much like diagrams that a very little detailed descrip-tion will suffice. For the examina-tion of the hair on man’s forearm the best subject is a dark-haired youth, and it is easily traced, though in any hairy subject it can be shown up well by placing the forearm in water for a minute and allowing the water to drain off. The normal and congenital hair-slope on the forearm is then well displayed.

On the front surface of man’s forearm the hairs point away from the elbow and divide in the middle of the surface into two streams, one passing to the outer and the other to the inner border in a downward gentle curve, and they join the streams of hair on the back surface. In this pattern there is nothing very peculiar, for it is shared by many monkeys.

When the back surface is examined it is found to present an arrangement of the hair which is unique among hairy mammals. The figure shows the eccentric course taken by the hair on the back surface. In the centre, exactly along the extensor border of the ulna, from the wrist to the point of the elbow, the hair-stream
has been bold enough to turn straight upwards in a narrow line, and it was here that our three great leaders saw their chance of claiming for Selection a tiny bit of territory, a kind of Duchy of Luxembourg between two great States, though, as I proceed to show, the claim is disallowed and untenable.

Fig 1.—Arrangement of Hair on the Forearm.

In the ape the hairs of the forearm are much longer and thicker than those of man, and both on the front and back all point from the wrist to the elbow.

In the lemur all the hairs point from the elbow to the wrist.

In the products of Nature there are no freaks, or impish tricks performed, and it is not for nothing she does her work. Every one of them asks for and should receive an explana-tion consistent with fact and reason, and here comes in the need for studying, as one may, the broad outlines of man’s ancestry. His ancestor being now sought in an earlier and more generalized stock than that of the four genera of anthropoid apes known to us, the most instructive and safest line to take is to trace him back to the stock lemur, who remains to-day among the most Chinese or unchanging of known mammals. In his illuminating work, Prehistoric Man and History, Professor Scott Elliott adopts an excellent term, “lemur-monkey-man,” to sum up, without missing links, the long ancestry of man. I take the liberty of adapting this term more closely to the present inquiry and use that of lemur-ape-man instead, for whatever may be the relation of man to present apes some ape-like ancestors enter into his genealogical tree.45 For my purpose the monkey is less useful because his hair-slope differs so little from that of lemurs, whereas apes have made for themselves a very remarkable position as regards the hair of their forearms. Our series of animals for study is then well represented by the lemur-ape-man—hypothetical, necessary and serviceable. Through all the immense stretch of time occupied in this process of descent there has been ample opportunity for the lemur to change his fashion to that of the ape, and the latter to change to the present fashion of man.

This simple arrangement of the lemur’s hair is common to that of all the more primitive long-bodied mammals, of which an otter is a good example, and I venture, greatly daring, to call this the normal slope of hair. Somewhere and somehow in the human tree there has appeared a total reversal of the lemur-type; the stock of apes acquired a new fashion, and gradually discarded
altogether their ancient inheritance, beginning their innova-tion perhaps, with Dryopithecus fontani in the Miocene Age.
The Dynamics of Hair-Pattern.

There are a few well-known facts which it is necessary to bear in mind if one is endeavouring to understand the mode of origin and order of the events before us. The hairy coat of a mammal is composed of individual hairs of varying length, colour and thickness, each being rooted in a tiny pit in the skin and growing from a papilla at its base. As the hair grows, its free end is pushed away from the papilla at the rate of one inch in two months. This is the rate in man’s hair, and it is probably greater in the case of lower mammals on account of the greater importance and physiological activity of their hairy coat than in man’s. But one inch in two months is a close enough calcula-tion. Here, then, is a structure which grows throughout the whole life of the animal, and has to dispose itself somehow on the surface of the skin. It does this in the line of least resistance, and to trace this line is the Alpha and Omega of the present inquiry.

There is a concep-tion of much value in understanding the dynamics of the distribu-tion of hair, and that is to view the hair of mammals as composed of certain streams. As in every illustra-tion, this concep-tion may be challenged because of some difference the critic may find between these streams and a stream of fluid. It certainly does not leave its bed as do the component parts of a river, a glacier or molten lava, for the base of the hair is fixed. But it will serve, and is at least not more open to objection than certain useful metaphors in biology as when the genealogy of man and animals is pictured as a tree, or the living things of the earth as a “web of life.” It is, then, as streams moving at the rate of one inch in two months in the lines of least resistance that I propose to discuss the animal hair and its diverse patterns and offer no further apology for doing so. Just as in the cases of a stream of water with varying banks and rocks in its course, or a glacier with its mountain-sides and sinuous valleys, or a stream of lava with small projecting surfaces of a mountain, our stream of hair flows on, hindered only by adequate obstructions.

Yet another concep-tion from the region of metaphor must be mentioned. It is one which will commend itself to every mind which has been steeped in thoughts of warfare for five years. We are all soldiers now; we think in terms of military affairs. In the case of our hair-streams there are in many regions two forces directly opposed to one another, others in which no struggle has
yet occurred, as, in the Great War, Italy was not at one period at open war with Germany.

Between the opposing forces in our small battle-field of the hairy coat there have been waged battles to which those of Mukden, Verdun, the Somme and Arras, are not to be compared in point of time. They are but as one day to a thousand years. On one side of the conflict in our present chosen field the ancient primitive type of the lemur has remained entrenched for some millions of years, until there arose new forces in its descendants on the other side and this changed the war of positions into one of movement. It was indeed “a contemptible little army” which came forward to oppose the ancient barbarian forces of the lemur, long prepared and organised, and these new armies fought under the banner, Habit. In the slowly-formed patterns in many types of mammals we have records of the treaties made after these long struggles and the rectifications of frontier which became necessary. The critic may call these “battles of kites and crows,” and ask What war correspondents were allowed to describe them; but a battle, whether great or small, long or short, is important to the parties concerned, and it is open to us to “reconstruct” the facts of the battle as do the historians on their part, for example, Sir James Ramsay the battle of Agincourt—with tolerable verisimilitude. But in science, especially geological science, the process of reconstruc-tion is much more ambitious and bold than any that is here attempted. Who has not been fascinated, if he has read Sir E. Ray Lankester’s work on Extinct Animals, by the skill and daring with which he conveys to us a vivid idea of the form and mode of life, with scanty data, of the extinct Moa of New Zealand, the great Pterodactyle, Pteranodon, or the Diprotodon of Owen—“the probable appearance in life” of these uncanny but very real inhabitants of the earth in days long past. How skilfully did Owen from a piece of bone seven inches long, sent to him by a gentleman in New Zealand sixty years ago, pronounce it to be a part of the thigh-bone of a bird like an ostrich, and then after a few years had passed, confirmed it by more bones of the skeleton, till the large Moa, extinguished 600 or 700 years ago by the Maoris, lived again before us—an historical personage; or how by the examina-tion of the skull and most of its skeleton the giant marsupial from Australia, Diprotodon, was resuscitated and admired; or again, how from the bones of the arms, shoulder-girdle and fingers was built up the strange body of Pteranodon, the great flying dragon. All of which is the legitimate and approved business of biologists and pal?ontologists, and this digression is made here to show that my line of
treatment of a little subject agrees with that in a greater one; nay, it even proceeds in its explanations of events on the ever valuable principle of Lyell in a still greater one without which to-day geology would be a thing of naught, that is, the principle of explaining changes in the surface of the earth by reference to causes now in action. The objection that one subject is very great and the other very small is not valid; for one as much as the other there are millions of years to be had for the asking. Who in these days hesitates to talk and try to think in millions?—tens of millions of men, millions of soldiers, millions upon millions of money, millions of bacteria in vaccines and millions of money belonging to other people disposed of by the new spendthrift Minister?
From Lemur to Ape.

Returning now to our Eocene lemur we must remind ourselves of the problem before his simple mind and those of his Simian descendants. How was he to change so greatly the direction of the hair on his forearm (Fig. 1) till it should turn right about face and imitate those great German “victories” of Hindenburg, well called Marshal Rückwarts? The problem lies open in the Figure and receiving no aid from Selection or survival of the fittest, in this little effort, he had to fall back on the eternal and tedious force of habit and use. I am afraid if here I were interrupted by some critic, more learned than wise, by a summary demand on the part of Selection for its share in the result, I should be tempted to reply with the word Φλυαρια employed by George Borrow, forbearing to give the transla-tion of the reply as he gives it. Anyhow, it is a case in which to “listen politely and change the subject.”

Here comes in the aspect of strife between primitive and new obstructing forces in a little hair-stream. The lemur lives in trees and carries on a stealthy nocturnal business, moving on all fours in quest of his daily bread, and no external force or new habit avails to modify the hair-slope on his forearms, and so it remains until some primitive form of monkey, gradually evolving into a primitive ape, brings into the family new habits and customs. Other men and other manners appear in the Miocene Age. Our supposed Dryopithecus fontani becomes more upright in his bodily, and perhaps his moral habits, and spends an increasing amount of his leisure time in the sitting posture; his hands are frequently grasping a bough as he sits and reflects, it may be in a man-ward direction, or, as is more likely, on his last meal of nuts and fruits. But he did not spend quite so much time as Wallace and others think in this futile attitude, for he knew in his way as much as the modern
bachelor does, of making his posture comfortable and restful when he was not out at work, and he varied his plans by resting his forearms on his thigh, crouched up and cosy, and doubtless slept much in this attitude. All these bold departures from his lemur-ancestor’s habits had the necessary result of altering the slope of his hair on the forearms, which was now growing as long and coarse as we see it to-day in the orang. In course of milleniums the ancient forces yielded to those of the new armies, and the once normal slope became reversed in a way which shocked the conservative lemurs of his day. It requires little imagina-tion to see how the lengthening thickening hairs on this limb-segment became changed in their direction by friction against the opposing surfaces of the thighs, by gravita-tion, and the frequent dripping of rain when they were held up to grasp a bough. Here then we see at work new forces of friction, pressure, gravita-tion and dripping of rain, turning endlessly and slowly the lemur-fashion into the ape-fashion, with unlimited time for their effectual action. In this stock of Man’s ancestry Selection was taking care of the individual and Habit of the details of his making—two truly harmonious partners.
From Ape to Man.

Another step, and a long one, has still to be taken from the ape-fashion to that of man. Bearing in mind that the lemur-fashion has been totally reversed by the ape it startles one to find that man in his modern fashion has largely reverted to that of the lemur on the front and sides of his forearm. This is clearly shown in Figure 1. There also you see graphically recorded in the hair of the extensor border of the ulna, a little backward streak, a poor little legacy of fifty pounds from the fortunes of many thousands once possessed by the ape. From the present limited point of view, man is a veritable pauper, and his possessions in this limb-segment may with some irony well be called a “vestige.”

Professor Scott-Elliott in his book, Prehistoric Man and His Story, p. 60, goes rather wide of the mark here in his graphic picture of our rude ancestor and his hard life. He gives too strongly the idea of him sitting asleep in raging gales, in driving rain which is neatly conducted by the thatch of his hair off his skin. As far as it goes this need not be questioned, as a matter of probability, but he states far too broadly “The hair on the arm, even of those civilised men who retain sufficient to trace the arrangement, turns down both upper and forearm to the elbow”46—true as to the
upper arm, but only true of the forearm in a very narrow streak of hair over the extensor surface of the ulna. The fact is that in every human being, not too old, its course can be traced with a lens. He overlooks also from this protective point of view the fact that the ape or early man, in the position of rest he describes, would have very much the reverse of protec-tion from the “lie” of the hair on his thighs, for this is towards the knee and is well calculated to catch the rain and conduct it carefully, or let it run, into his groins. So the protec-tion theory (under the empire of Selection) is again in straits. But I must not forget my self-denying ordinance alluded to in the Preface, but will show how the ape fashion began to be modified into its present and probably final form in man. Still further changes in the simple habits of the earliest men became frequent, and fresh forces were organised in our mimic battlefield. Gravita-tion gradually ceased to act as the hairs became thinner and shorter. Friction and pressure changed their lines of incidence with the increasing tendency of man to assume the upright posture, for the surfaces exposed to pressure and friction were only affected when the extensor surface or back of the forearm rested on some supporting object, an attitude extremely common in man as we know him now. Then came the opportunity of the primitive barbarian host, the lemur fashion, by a prolonged counter-attack to recover on the greater part of the forearm the ground lost millions of years before by the ape, and then was engraved on the forearm of man the permanent treaty which we have before us to-day.

This small and apparently trivial battle-ground has been described at what may seem undue length, but it is a miniature of the rise and fall of little empires such as here engage our attention, and I make no apology for this to the reader who has gone thus far with me, for, on the principle of ex uno disce omnes, all that follows in other areas of the hairy coat of mammals will be the clearer, and little repeti-tion will be needed.

Note.—Two terms have been used somewhat freely in this Introduc-tion, “vestige” and “normal,” and a few remarks upon them are not out of place, for they are both somewhat ambiguous and apt to be carelessly employed.

A vestige in biological writings is almost the exclusive property of the Pan-Selectionists, and no one can doubt that on the one hand it is a far more correct term than that of rudiment which Darwin employed so freely, on the other that they have a perfectly legitimate claim to it in a large number of obsolete structures of animal forms. But vestiges, footsteps, footprints, have another and equally correct meaning, even if less often thus employed, in the fact that a vestige or footprint may just as well be a relic of what the race and individuals have done, as a relic of what they have retained in the way of possession, and I submit that the facts and arguments I have here advanced afford a valid claim to the term “vestige” in the results of certain doings on the part of animals—as will appear later still more clearly.

The term “normal” is a fine field for dialectics, but neither ordinary men nor scientific students can do their work without its use, and yet it would have been an intellectual treat to have heard how Huxley, for example, would have turned inside out any opponent who chose to employ it to his dissatisfac-tion. In a strictly-conducted tournament no evolutionary biologist would allow its use—to his adversary. A norm for him exists only as one of Professor Karl Pearson’s “conceptual counters,” a piece of mental shorthand or hardly more than a pis aller. Among the fundamental conceptions of organic evolution there is one which is almost a truism, the doctrine of Heraclitus, π?ντα ρε?ι, the everlasting flux and change of Nature and her products. In strict logic, according to what we all now believe, there is no possible norm. All that one may do is to take stock at a certain epoch of evolution and label, for our own convenience, some group, or organism or structure as “normal”—and go on with our business, collecting some specimens, calling them type-specimens, and putting them in books or cases in the Natural History Museum—and then proceed to business.

The biological teacher in his class room says he must live, he must have his tools for his work, to which the idle student replies under his breath, “I do not see the necessity,” but then few students are now idle, and this jibe does not sting any one! The examiner must have his normal human anatomy, and would ruthlessly plough any daring examinee who tried to sophisticate the meaning of the term “normal.” I have often been struck with what I must call the intellectual audacity of a most eminent leader in physical science and mathematics, who is not unlike a certain great Church, which grants nothing to her adversaries but is not averse from taking. In his Grammar of Science, written with a pen dipped in hydrochloric acid, Professor Karl Pearson four times over, and perhaps more, has the courage to call the human brain in this twentieth century “normal.” Has he never heard of the coming Superman of Mr. Bernard Shaw and other prophets? Thinking sub specie aeternitatis has he here in the West, and at a certain small epoch of time, any right to call the human brain “normal”? I can only long that there may be more normal brains such as Professor Karl Pearson’s, and am almost inclined to echo the prayer of Moses, “Would God all the Lord’s people were [such] prophets”! These comments on the term “normal” imply no complaint against its use, indeed are a claim for it, and I deprecate very much that form of criticism known in boys’ schools, domestic circles, and among politicians as the tu quoque reply, and I hope the few ambiguous terms used in this book will pass the censor, and help the reader.
CHAPTER VII. THE EVOLUTION OF PATTERNS OF HAIR.
Some attention must here be given to the supposed mode of formation of individual patterns of hair, that is to say, their evolution. So here one has to move among the fields of hypothesis, without which detached facts of nature are useless to science.

The simplest pattern consists of a reversed area of hair appearing between two adjoining streams; the more complex are whorls, featherings and crests. No detailed descrip-tion nor illustra-tion of the former are required, but I have prepared a diagram to illustrate the latter (see p. 51.) (A) shows a whorl by itself; (B) a whorl, feathering and crest. The arrows at the sides indicate the direction of the adjoining hair-streams, the arrow in the centre of (B) the direction of the reversed flow of hair.

Fig. 2.—A. Diagram of a whorl.
B. Diagram of a whorl (W) a fea-ther-ing (F) a crest (C).

An understanding of the dynamics of a hair-whorl leads quite simply to that of a feathering and crest, for the two latter are only the results of the further extension of the battle of forces concerned in the whorl itself, and the end of their conflict. A whorl marks a point in the stream of hair where two contending forces have come into collision; on the one hand the centrifugal force of growth from each hair-papilla, the rate of which has been described, and on the other a certain centripetal dynamic force which may be either that of localised friction, pressure, gravita-tion, or muscular traction, directly opposing or divergent. Thus conceived a whorl may be looked at symbolically as a written treaty between two nations, one of which has defeated the other, and actually as a proof that the contending centrifugal and centripetal forces are in the state called the balance of power. But when the centripetal force of some habitual action prevails over that of the original force of growth in the hair, a whorl becomes extended into a feathering, and the length of this, metaphorically speaking, corresponds with the duration of open fighting, and terminated by a sharp crest when another and a decisive battle has been fought. A crest may again be looked upon as a “treaty.” The whole process pictured here shows a battle followed by a treaty or truce (W) again a retreat (F) and a counter-attack (C) with a final treaty and peace.

This hypothetical treatment, with addition of some metaphors, does not carry us far enough to leave it thus to the tender mercy of that class of critic who relies too much on the “argument from ignorance.” He tells us such a process as I have pictured may be true or not, and that no one can do more than leave the case open, and treat it like that of Jarndyce & Jarndyce where it would remain in Chancery till all of us concerned in the inquiry have returned to our dust. The critic might reasonably ask for experiments which will bear out the suggested views. But verifica-tion by calculated experiments is impossible, for, ex hypothesi, the variations or patterns which are described require long periods of time for their produc-tion. Such experiments being ruled out, the evidence in favour of the hypothesis must be sought in some region of the hairy coat of mammals where whorls, featherings and crests can be observed in all stages of their formation.
The Side of the Horse’s Neck.

The field chosen for observa-tion is, from one point of view, the most remarkable among all the numerous regions in the great series of hair-clad mammals. The side of the neck in the domestic horse displays all degrees and forms of whorls, featherings and crests in such variety as to be almost bewildering. I must have examined many thousands of specimens of this valuable large mammal in reference to this state of things on the side of its neck, and can only regret that I have not kept any record of them as to number or quality, and I fear the opportunity for doing so will not return in this country. There are three reasons for this choice
of field. In the first place there is or was an extensive supply of the specimens for examina-tion; in the second, the side of a horse’s neck is a region where no extraneous or artificial agents, such as harness, except a bridle, can operate, and therefore Nature and the animal’s habits have free play; in the third the neck of a horse in its locomotive life is subject to powerful mechanical forces which are constant, literally speaking, while it walks, trots, canters or gallops. Here then, if anywhere, one may read the records, in indelible characters of hair patterns, the history of its active life and that of its ancestors, and here also one may reasonably expect to find these patterns in every possible stage of formation, from a mere rudiment to the most finished product in a whorl, feathering and crest—and this is precisely what is found to exist.

Even an observer not acquainted with the anatomy of this region who watches closely a horse in action cannot fail to notice how at every step taken there is a marked jolt of the neck produced in the neck by the impact of its hoofs with the ground and in supporting its heavy skull. I have computed several times the number of jolts that the neck of a trotting horse sustains, in my numerous rides behind various horses, during many hundreds of miles, and have reckoned the number which occur in a horse trotting for an hour, at the usual rate at which a doctor travels. This is on the average 6,000, and of course the numbers of jolts in walking, cantering, and galloping vary according to these different paces. But a great deal more of movement of the head and neck is observed beside the jolt at every step. See how the animal tosses up its head, twists it to this and that side for the mere joie de vivre when it is fresh, or, even when hindered by blinkers,47 how he turns his head to look at every passing object in the road with his ancestral caution, how he will pass contemptuously a great horse-waggon or even now a villainous-looking motor lorry, but will peer at a beggar woman sitting beside the road, or a heap of stones, or a yapping cur! All this vivid muscular work of a horse’s head and neck hardly ceases while he is in action and at any rate not till he is dead beat, and the higher the courage and breeding of the horse the more frequent and brisk are his movements. Is it possible to conceive a region of the body of any large mammal where more numerous, varied, and powerful action of underlying muscles can
be found playing their ceaseless tricks on the sober normal slope of hair in the skin which covers them? If there be any region approaching this I have not found it.



Fig. 3.—Superficial muscles concerned in the move-ments of the head and neck of the horse.



Fig. 4.—Deeper layer of the muscles concerned in the move-ments of the head and neck of the horse; the scapula removed.

The main facts of the anatomy of the horse’s neck must be referred to here, so that a better picture may be obtained as to the powerful forces which are found in conflict during the locomotive life of the animal. Fig. 3 shows the superficial layer of muscles concerned in the actions of its head and neck, and the manner in which adjoining muscles diverge from one another should be noted. Fig. 4 gives the deepest layer of neck-muscles, the shoulder-blade having been removed, and Fig. 5 the immensely strong ligamentum nuchae, of yellow elastic tissue, which extends from the base of the skull to the great projecting spinous process of the lowest cervical and second and third dorsal vertebr?.



Fig. 5.—Ligaments and tendons supporting the head and neck of the horse.

There are here indeed great forces for conflict—first a layer of strong superficial muscles, second a layer of smaller muscles which has not been figured, third a deep layer of muscles, and fourth a powerful, widely-spread and strongly-attached mass of
dense elastic tissue, adapted for supporting the head without muscular exertion, but by its elasticity allowing a downward jerk of the head and neck at every step. It is an exceedingly important structure for a domestic horse.
The Normal Arrangement of Hair.

So much for the active part played by a horse’s neck and head, and for the simpler anatomical facts of the region involved. Before proceeding to describe the results of these as seen in the hair, it is well to make sure of a point which a critic might raise. “How do you know,” says he, “that some of the variations in this highly variable region of the hair are not normal. What is the normal type here?” A very easy answer to this is found by studying, not only any Ungulate known, except the Gnu, but more particularly all wild Equid?; and this reveals the fact that in all this series the normal slope of hair prevails here, that is to say, an even trend from head to shoulder. Variations in others, indeed, hardly exist, and I may add that the absence of variations here is a strong piece of negative evidence in my favour, for no Ungulate comes near the domestic horse for amount and activity of locomo-tion, which is indeed his raison d’être. He is the only one that has invented new patterns. But a little direct evidence can be brought which clinches this argument from inference based on ancestry. I made an examina-tion, at the stables of Messrs. Tilling, at Peckham, of 100 consecutive specimens of hackney, for the purpose of ascertaining the propor-tion in that group of those that showed the normal slope on the neck to those with variations. In 62 of these the normal existed on both sides of the neck, 18 Normal on one side, and in the remaining 20 there were variations on both sides. If 100 specimens of horses contain 80 with one side and 62 with both normal the previous inference requires no further support.
Fourteen Varieties.

I have put together here, and described, fourteen out of a much larger number of the most instructive varieties of pattern that I have been able to collect during the course of many years and examina-tion of several thousand horses. They comprise examples the mostly likely, as I think, to convey to the reader an adequate picture of the results of the strength, number and variety of mechanical forces in our present battle-field of hair. The diagrams almost speak for themselves, but a short written descrip-tion will help to emphasise the salient points.

There are pictured here the normal type, divergent hair-streams partially reversed, simple whorls in different regions, a whorl and feathering, whorls, featherings and crests, and these in several areas. It is a veritable portrait gallery in which is portrayed the earliest and latest stages of this family of fashions in hair on the horse’s neck. They are grouped mostly in pairs.



Fig. 6.—Side of Neck of Horse.

Normal type, hair-stream passing evenly in line of neck.—Bay hack-ney, examined 3rd May, 1904.

Fig. 7.—Side of Neck of Horse.

Complete whorl with wide feathering which ex-tends from base of the neck to the ear where it ends in a crest.—W.F.C.

Brown hackney, examined 12th January, 1904.


Fig. 6 shows the normal slope and by its side Fig. 7 gives a view of the best specimen of a completed whorl, feathering and crest I have been able to examine, the whole length of the neck being occupied by it. So in this pair the normal and most extensive departure from it lie side by side.



Fig. 8.—Side of Neck of Horse.

Offside, anterior portion of neck showing line of di-vi-sion, B to A, along up-per bor-der of sterno-mastoid muscle, nor-mal arrange-ment from A to C.

Grey pony, examined 15th December, 1903.



Fig 9.—Side of Neck in Horse.

Near side, winter coat, showing nor-mal ar-range-ment from B to A, where a division begins and ex-tends along up-per bor-der of ster-no-mas-toid muscle to base of neck.

Brown hackney, examined 28th December, 1903.

Fig. 8 shows the way in which two streams of hair close up to the ears begin to diverge. Fig. 9 a similar divergence towards the base of the neck.



Fig. 10.—Side of Neck of Horse.

Line of division of streams curving upwards to the mane near the base of the neck.

Chestnut cart horse, examined 9th December, 1903.

Fig. 11.—Side of Neck of Horse.

Near side, line of division along the up-per bor-der of ster-no-mas-toid muscle di-vert-ed at C towards the mane.

Bay cart horse, examined 11th December, 1903.

Fig. 10 gives not only a divergence, but a well-marked turn in the upper hair-stream and Fig. 11 the way in which this divergent turn of hair is being converted into a feathering.

Fig. 12.—Side of Neck of Horse.

Near side, at C upward curve towards mane. Brownish-yellow hackney, examined 18th August, 1903.

The same horse as appears in Fig. 13.

Fig. 13.—Side of Neck of Horse—same spe-ci-men as in Fig. 12.

Offside, fully developed whorl, feathering and crest W, F, C, lying along upper border of ster-no-mas-toid muscle. Two stages of for-ma-tion of this form of pat-tern in one spe-ci-men.

Brownish-yellow hackney, examined 18th August, 1903.

Fig. 12 presents a stream of hair still more twisted from its course than that of Fig. 10, and Fig. 13 a whorl going on to a feathering which loses itself, without coming to an abrupt stop in a crest which is the more usual course.

Fig. 14.—Side of Neck of Horse.

Near side, whorl (W) in place of common line of di-vi-sion, with wide for-ward fea-ther-ing to A, where the hair streams di-verge sharply.

Brown hackney, examined 19th November, 1903.

Fig. 15.—Side of Neck of Horse.

Near side, showing (B to C1) diversion of hair stream towards mane (W1F1C1) whorl, fea-ther-ing and crest; W1 to W2 stream in normal di-rec-tion W2 a sec-ond whorl.

Chestnut cart horse, examined 1st January, 1904.

Fig. 14 is a common type of whorl, feathering and crest in the most usual situation. Fig. 15 a rarer and more complicated instance of a simple whorl, a gap and then a whorl, feathering and crest in the same “critical area.”

Fig. 16.—Side of Neck of Horse.

Near side (W1F1C1) showing whorl, fea-ther-ing and crest along up-per line of di-vi-sion (W2F2C2) a sec-ond fully-formed whorl, fea-ther-ing and crest, cross-ing both up-per and lower lines of di-vi-sion, and end-ing at W1. Grey pony, exam-ined 23rd May, 1903.

Fig. 17.—Side of Neck of Horse.

Near side (W1F1C1) whorl, fea-ther-ing and crest, fully-formed, cut-ting up-per line of di-vi-sion at ob-tuse angle and a sec-ond whorl, fea-ther-ing and crest (W2F2C2) along an-ter-ior part of com-mon line of di-vi-sion. Roan hack-ney, exam-ined 7th November, 1903.

Fig. 16 and Fig. 17 are rare cases of irregularly placed double whorls, featherings and crests, and give evidence of unusually complicated traction of adjoining muscles underneath this battle-field of hair.

Fig. 18.—Side of Neck of Horse.

Off side, simple whorl, behind ear at edge of mane.

Fig. 19.—Side of Neck of Horse.

Simple whorl (W) at edge of mane midway between ears and base of neck.

Figs. 18 and 19 show a simple whorl, situated at the very edge of the mane, a very “critical” area because this looser and heavy part of the neck is very much subject to jolting during the horse’s action.

I have little to add to the graphic evidence afforded by these pictures, each of which I observed noted and sketched as the bearers of them came before me during many years of a “Captain-Cuttle-like” disposal of some of my leisure. No clearer proof can be desired of the view here advanced, that habit or habitual muscular action, and jolting, is the cause of the varied patterns in this field, and that according to the Law of Parcimony no other is required, this canon of Occam being expressed more succinctly—Neither more, nor more onerous causes are to be assumed than are necessary to account for the phenomena.
CHAPTER VIII. CAN MUSCULAR ACTION CHANGE THE DIRECTION OF HAIR IN THE INDIVIDUAL?
It might seem unnecessary to most persons who are good enough to follow this inquiry that the question asked above should receive an explicit answer. We all know, of course, how a man’s hair is said to stand on end in excessive states of horror or rage, and how a short-haired terrier’s back bristles at the sight of certain foes. But it is not so simple a matter to show that the direction of the hair is permanently changed. I submit that the persons I mention are right in their opinion for this work contains evidence throughout that muscular action beneath the skin is the efficient cause in many regions of the formation of hair patterns. But like Kirkpatrick when Bruce struck down the Red Comyn we had best “make sicker,” and give as much evidence of the affirmative question as any critic can demand.
Hairs of Human Eyebrows.

As in the previous chapter I chose an open and plain field for the evidence bearing on the formation of whorls and the like, so here I turn to one still more clear for him who runs to read. In these days old men are of less account than in earlier and simpler times, but I claim to have found “a new use for old men” as I had almost thought of calling this chapter. In this somewhat neglected group we have an almost unlimited number of specimens for examina-tion, and in their eyebrows they furnish a valuable field for tracing some striking results of underlying muscular traction.

Darwin made one of his few mistakes when he included among rudimentary and inherited structures48 those few long hairs which are often seen in the eyebrows of man, looking upon them as representatives of those found in some species of macacus and the chimpanzee. That great and modest man was, I am sure, not in the habit of making much use of the looking-glass—not more than women who, as we know, rarely do such a thing. But if he did
he would have observed in his own splendid frontal region and brows excellent examples of the phenomena which form the subject of this chapter. This I know, though I never saw him in the flesh, for it so happens that in the great volume published in the jubilee of The Origin, and called Darwin and Modern Science, two good photographs of him, at the ages of thirty-five and about seventy-one are reproduced. These both show, but the later one much more clearly, good examples of these long and not very ornamental aberrant hairs. Thirty-five years of arduous thought and work had told their tale on him and twisted from their normal paths the lengthening thickening hairs of his eyebrows.

Also, if he had looked a little beyond the eyebrows he would have seen some very deep wrinkles of the skin on his forehead and round his orbits. It is these two groups of facts, wrinkles and twisted, changed hairs of man’s eyebrows, which give the answer to the question “Can muscular action change the direction of hair in the individual?”

In 1903 I drew the attention of the Anatomical Society of Great Britain and Ireland to these two groups of facts under the title “Notes on the Eyebrows of Man,” and presented some large drawings of individual elderly men of my acquaintance, and the present chapter is only an extension of that little piece of work.

No area of the mammalian skin is so useful and easy to follow as this in answering the present question, for though the previous chapter supplied part of the answer in a very fruitful field, the proof still remained one of “tremendous probability” and not more. But in the frontal and superciliary region of man there is complete proof of the truth of the affirmative answer, as I shall show.

Here again we must encounter our old friend the normal slope of hair. As I stated in 1903, “The normal arrangement of the hair on the eyebrows of a moderately hairy subject is as follows: in the middle line the hairs of the two sides tend to meet and form a somewhat confused group of hairs; passing away from the middle line the hairs assume a nearly sagittal direction, then become more sloped away, and a sharp change in the direction of the frontal and orbital streams brings the remaining hairs into that regular accurate arrangement of a united stream so characteristic of a hairy subject, and this passes along the superciliary ridge to the external angular process”—all of which can be seen at a glance by any one who looks closely enough, as with the eyes of a lover, for example, at the brows of a dark-haired maid or youth. In the young these hairs lie close to the skin, and with that very interesting group of persons we have no more to do here, except
for one piece of practical advice to them which they will find at the end of the present chapter.
Evidence from Artists.

More than one kind of evidence may be brought forward in this case, and I propose to “put in” a certain class of witness that not the most acute cross-examining counsel, Daniel O’Connell, Hawkins, or even Sergeant Buzfuz, can shake. I pity that young man or woman to-day who has not mended several holes in his education by reading the books of Dickens and Lever in editions illustrated by the immortal Phiz. If I do no more for him by this passage than induce him to mend such holes I shall have been of some use to his mind. For my part I look upon Phiz as far superior to Hogarth or Cruikshank in the fidelity to nature of his drawings of the faces of his numerous characters, especially the old men. Look through Dombey & Son, Bleak House, Pickwick Papers, Barnaby Rudge, Tom Burke, Jack Hinton, Harry Lorrequer, The O’Donohue, and, perhaps best of all for the illustrations, The Knight of Gwynne. Examine, with a lens if necessary, the delicate way in which Phiz shows the projecting hairs on the eyebrows of his many elderly men, and note at the same time the truth to scientific fact which he shows in his female characters, for only in the drawings of “Mrs. Gamp proposes a toast” and of Mrs. Pipchin in “Paul and Mrs. Pipchin,” and one or two doubtful instances, can I find that he represents even his elderly women with this feature of their eyebrow hairs. But see Captain Cuttle and Mr. Bunsby in “Solemn references to Mrs. Bunsby,” both with strongly-marked shelves of hair sticking out from the brows, Captain Cuttle in “The shadow in the little parlour,” one of the fat coachmen in “Mr. Weller and his friends drinking to Mr. Pell”—the sharp brush projecting from the brow of Bagnet in “Mr. Smallweed breaks the pipe of peace,” that of Vholes in “Attorney and Client, fortitude and impatience”—(the equally remarkable absence of this feature in Pecksniff, Chadband and Skimpole, men without character or feeling)—Gashford in “Lord George Gordon,” the fat figure in “The Gallant Vintner,” Pioche in “Minette in attendance on Pioche,” the courtier in “Louis XIV. and de Genchy,” “The death of Shaun,” the blind man in “Joe the mighty hunter,” the right hand figure in “Mr. O’Leary creating a sensation,” Sir Archibald Mc’Nab in “A fireside group,” “Roade’s return to O’Donoughue Castle,” Sandy Mc’Grane and Old Hickman in “Sandy expedites the doctor,” Daly in “Daly bestows a helmet on Bully Dodd,” the knight in
“The Knight is taken Prisoner.”

Another witness to the scientific facts of the frequent presence of these hairs on the eyebrows of elderly men, and the rarity of them in those of women, is the dear friend of our youth, our friend even to hoar hairs, the Book of Nonsense, by Edward Lear. Here in 110 vivid drawings of several hundred characters, each of them sketched with a few bold strokes, is inscribed again and again this peculiar feature. Look at the “Old man with a nose,” the “Old Man of th’Abruzzi,” the “Old man of Melrose,” the “Old man of Calcutta,” the “Old Person of Anerley,” the “Old Person of Chester,” all with strange and striking bushes of long hairs standing out from their brows. Again see how hardly one of the female characters shows a trace of it even in that most truculent “Grandmother of the Young Person of Smyrna” who threatened to burn her, though her vertical wrinkles are formidable, or in the remarkable face of the wife of the “Old Man of Peru.” The “Old Lady of Prague” shows it in a moderate degree. Support of this kind may be trivial, and so will the opposing counsel say is that of a burglar’s finger-prints, but, qua evidence, it is as strong as that which commits the criminal to a prison on this modern proof. No one can suppose that Phiz and Lear fifty or sixty years ago had a prophetic and treacherous insight into the harmless labours of a man in the year 1920 who would exploit their labours to the advantage of his hypothesis, and that they faked their caricatures for such a purpose. This is the only alternative line for Sergeant Buzfuz to take unless he acknowledge the facts to be facts, and betake himself to abuse of the plaintiff’s attorney.
Eyebrows Interpreted by Wrinkles.

When one comes to the interpreta-tion of the curious shapes taken by these hairs one is not left to inference, for Nature has put some indelible stamps on the forehead and round the orbits of the men examined. These are wrinkles which have been long in prepara-tion and only begin to show themselves fully when the “evil days” have come, in the ’fifties, ’sixties and ’seventies.

I will describe the wrinkles first, and then their results, with examples, in the numerous fashions of the hairs. Wrinkles are of two kinds, pathological and physiological, in other words the former are the results of degenera-tion and wasting of the subcutaneous fat and loss of its normal elasticity, and are found in the faces of nearly all men and women, with advancing age, and they are the subject of much distress in the fair sex and a good deal of “beauty doctoring.” The latter are the result of long-continued and repeated action of certain small muscles. The former are
numerous, shallow and fine, the latter few and comparatively deep. The difference between elderly women and men in respect of the projecting hairs is not that men have many more physiological wrinkles, but that the hairs of women in this region do not stiffen and grow long nearly so much as those of men.

There are three groups of wrinkles found on the human forehead and face, vertical, arched or horizontal and orbital. This division of wrinkles is a natural one, for each group is produced by the action of different muscles, the vertical by the corrugator muscle, which is a narrow band passing from under the frontalis muscle inwards, where it is attached to the bone between the two eyebrows; the arched by the action of the frontalis muscle, one which moves the scalp and in doing so elevates the eyebrows; the orbital by the elliptic orbicularis muscle which closes the eyelids. These muscles are shown in Fig. 20.

Vertical wrinkles are found in the central region of the forehead and sometimes occupy the middle line with a deep furrow, more often they are bilateral and symmetrical, near the inner fourth part of the eyebrow, and sometimes they are placed at different distances from the middle line.

Arched wrinkles extend over the forehead in a series of lines which are usually concentric with the curve of the eyebrows, but are sometimes nearly horizontal.

Orbital wrinkles may lie in a radiating plan all round the outer lower and inner borders of the orbit, and in some persons they are found lying over the curves of the orbicularis muscle itself.
Some Examples.

The variations in the long hairs of men’s eyebrows present some very singular tufts, and I have added below nine figures of certain cases examined and noted by myself, and these are, I hope, plain enough without any more detailed account than is given in the few words describing each.

Unless one’s attention be specially directed to these aberrant hairs, which are extremely common, one would not expect that hairs could be so variously twisted by muscular action beneath them. You may see a tuft of long hair projecting from the plane of the eyebrows towards the inner end, looking like a small horn, and I have measured individual hairs in elderly persons and found many an inch in length and a few an inch and a half. Such a tuft gives a fierce look to the countenance if the hairs are bushy and plentiful. The celebrated Dr. Keate, the flogging Head of Eton, a fiery strenuous person, was noted for the extraordinary long
horn of thick hair in his eyebrows, which he appeared to use as a supplementary finger to point to this or that object of his terrifying attention. You may also see a man with a great drooping curtain of hairs overhanging his eyes, half hiding the upper lids and eyes. Another will show at the outer end of the eyebrows a bristling bush of hairs turning upwards in the aggressive manner of Wilhelm II. of evil memory, or of Mr. Roosevelt in former times. Again the outer points of the eyebrow hairs may turn downwards like a cavalry moustache, or the hairs may stand out at right angles as a level shelf. The fashions of these “orbital moustaches” appear to be as numerous as those of the upper lip.
A Conflict of Forces.

If the eyebrows are studied in the light of the three muscles displayed in Fig. 20 it is seen to contain an interesting congeries of small forces in conflict. (1) The frontalis moves the eyebrow directly upwards. I had a friend once about seventy years old who was a very vigorous, strong-willed man and he spoke with decision and energy. It was most interesting to watch how his frontalis muscle strongly and frequently contracted as he spoke and drew up his eyebrows so that one might, as it were, measure the strength of his expressed convictions by the rate of action of his frontalis muscle! (2) The corrugator draws the skin of the eyebrow inwards to the middle line thus acting at a right angle to the line of the frontalis. (3) The orbicularis in the upper part directly opposes the action of the frontalis and in the lower acts “on its own” in closing the lower lid. This little spot is a Hill 60, destroyed at the battle of Messines, and has been the scene of much fighting throughout life, and it bears abiding witness in the twists and curves of the long hairs to the severity of the struggles. These actions of the three contending muscles are involuntary and of a reflex character, and much employed in such habits as those of knitting the brows or in elevating or depressing them, all this being set going and controlled by cerebral action. Incidentally then the preponderance of one or more of these actions over others, as shown in the hair, is evidence, as far as it goes, of the disposi-tion and character of the possessor. So that between the wrinkles and the twisted hairs of his brow the elderly man, and less so the woman, carries about an engraved statement, for his friends or enemies to read, of his natural disposi-tion and his acquired habits, in a limited field—his written character!



Fig. 20.

Muscles surrounding orbit with lines of action. Left—muscles con-cerned in move-ments of parts round orbits. Right—lines of ac-tion of these muscles in-di-cated by arrows.



Fig. 21.—C. B. ?t 81.

Hairs: Thick and bushy eyebrows. At junc-tion of outer and middle third of each side the thick hairs turn abruptly down-wards in a tuft and cover the upper lid.

Wrinkles: Arched and lateral fairly well-marked, one very deep, cen-tral and ver-ti-cal wrinkle.