Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/825

Rh To binder such a tendency it is only needful to learn its cause, which seems to be no other than wearing tightly fitting head-covering, living in-doors, and the lately developed habit of keeping the hair closely cropped. Among the savage races, who live out-doors most of the time and go bareheaded, baldness is unknown. To these hair is a protection. It grows in rank profusion without care. Something is needed to protect the scalp from sun and wind and rain, and hair grows luxuriantly; when hats and caps were invented they took the place of the natural shield, and the hair, having no longer any function to perform, fell away. The days of its usefulness in the economy of life are past, and, like the tails of the monkeys and the muscles of the ears, it has become rudimentary from disuse. If it is to be restored to its former glory, men must stop making "close crops," and must go bareheaded. That there are fewer bald-headed women than men is due to the fact that ladies do not "shingle" their hair after the manner of the sterner sex. The recent fashion of "banging" and "frizzing" their hair, adopted by ladies of fashion, is a death-blow to their sex having good hair much longer. If it continues, there will be as many bald-headed women as men. Allowing the hair to grow long and exposing the head to the weather with little or no protection are the methods by which a rapidly disappearing beauty of the race can be restored. It is to this neglect of fashionable care that the farmers with "hay-seed in their hair" owe their comparative freedom from baldness. The man or woman who wears a closely fitting cap and works in overheated shops and stores, under the rays of gas and electric lights, can not expect to have good hair. If they want to be "worth scalping" they must go out in the open air and expose their heads so that they will feel the need of scalp-locks. Nature never makes anything for which she has no need, and, when she finds that her works are of no use, she proceeds to eliminate the superfluous article.

The same rule can be applied to the early decay of human teeth, and with the same results. Old men now living tell of a time when dentists were almost unknown. The family physician used to keep a pair of forceps and tooth-keys to pull out such teeth as insisted on aching for an unreasonable length of time, while the idea of false teeth was so strange that the person who had a set was an object of curiosity for the whole neighborhood. Now, nearly half the people over twenty years of age have one or both jaws occupied by artificial teeth, and the sign of the dentist occupies a conspicuous place on every street corner.

When the men used to live largely on a meat diet, sometimes cooked, though oftener raw—tearing it off from the bones in great junks, and chewing it like beasts of prey—they had some use for canines and molars, and these implements were furnished to meet the demand. With the invention of knives and forks, of hashes and