Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 4.djvu/465

Rh introduce his frightful countenance into the court of heaven, and his present tour may be regarded as a sort of preparation for death, as he devotes all the money he makes, over and above his outlay for creature comforts, to purchasing the prayers of a devout community of monks in his native village, Kostroma, after his mortal career is ended.

Andrian is of medium stature, but very strongly built. His excessive capillary development is not true hair, being simply an abnormal growth of the down or fine hairs which usually cover nearly the entire surface of the human body. Strictly speaking, he has neither head-hair, beard, mustache, eyebrows, nor eyelashes, their place being taken by this singular growth of long, silky down. In color this is of a dirty yellow; it is about three inches in length, all over the face, and feels like the hair of a Newfoundland dog. The very eyelids are covered with this long hair, while flowing locks come out of his nostrils and ears. On his body are isolated patches, strewed, but not thickly, with hairs one and a half to two inches long. Dr. Bertillon, of Paris, compared a hair from Andrian's chin with a very fine hair from a man's beard, and found that the latter was three times as thick as the former; and a hair from Andrian's head is only one-half as thick as an average human hair.



When these strange beings were exhibited in Berlin, Prof. Virchow was much interested in them, and gathered all accessible information about their life and ancestry. He states that Andrian is, so far as known, the first of his line to present this wonderful hirsuteness. Neither his reputed father nor his mother presented any peculiarity of