Page:Bierce - Collected Works - Volume 09.djvu/31

Rh choose the bald one, or, both being bald, the balder? Having, therefore, a considerable advantage, the bald person naturally lives longer than his less gifted competitor (anyone can observe that he is usually the older) and leaves a more numerous progeny, inheriting the paternal endowment of precarious hair. In a few generations more those varieties of our species known as the Mophead and the Curled Darling will doubtless have become extinct, and the barber {Homo loquax) will have followed them into oblivion.

Another German physician (named Müller—the German physician who is not named Müller has had a narrow escape) points out the increasing prevalence of baldness and declares it hereditary. That many human beings are born partly bald is not, I take it, what he means, but that the tendency to lose the hair early in life is transmitted from father to son. It is understood that the ladies have nothing to do with the matter; they are never bald, but the hair of none of them, I understand, is so long and thick as it once was.

It IS difficult to offset such facts as these with facts of a contrary sort. Cowboys and artists—sometimes poets—are found with long hair, but long hair is not thought to be an ad-