Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/269

Rh upon the chin and lip, and while we can admire an African or a North American Indian with a smooth and glossy cheek, we turn with dislike from thin and scanty hair either in a European, a negro, or an Asiatic. It seems to me that in every case the general æsthetic feeling of the whole human race is the same; but that in one tribe circumstances have made it easier to produce one type of beauty, while in another tribe other conditions have determined the production of another type. Thus, in a negro, a very black and lustrous skin, clear bright eyes, white teeth, and a general conformity to the normal or average negro features are decidedly pleasant even to Europeans when once the ordinary standard has become familiar; while in a European the same eyes and teeth are admired, but a white skin, a rosy complexion, and moderate conformity to the ideal Aryan type are demanded. Each is alike pretty after its own kind, though naturally the race to which we each ourselves belong possesses in most cases the greatest attractiveness to each of us individually.

Of course, both in the beard of man, and in the general hairiness of his body, as compared with woman, allowance must be made for that universal tendency of the male to produce extended tegumentary modifications, which, as Mr. Wallace has abundantly shown, depends upon the superior vigor of that sex. Yet the period when the beard first shows itself and the loss of color in the hair of both sexes after the reproductive period is past clearly stamp these modifications as sexual in origin.

It must be remembered also, in accounting for the general loss of hair on both back and front of the body, that the older ancestral heredity would tend to make the chest bare, and the newer acquired habits would tend to produce like results upon the back. "In the adult male of the gorilla," says Du Chaillu, "the chest is bare. In the young males which I kept in captivity it was thinly covered with hair. In the female the mammæ have but a slight development and the breast is bare." All this helps us to see how the first steps in the sexually selective process might have taken place, and also why the trunk is on the whole more denuded than the legs. As for the exceptional fact that the arms are hairier on the back than in front, besides the functional explanation already given, we must recollect that the anthropoid apes have long hair on the outer side of the arms, which has probably left this slight memento of its former existence on the human subject. Eschricht has pointed out the curious fact that alike in man and the higher quadrumana this hair has a convergent direction toward the point of the elbow, both from above and from below.

Finally, it may be noted that the hairless condition of man, though