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 examination, 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 structures[48] 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.
[48] _Descent of Man_, p. 19.
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, _quâ_ 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 interpretation 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 preparation 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 degeneration 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 disposition
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 disposition and his acquired habits, in a limited
field--his written character!
[Illustration: Fig. 20.
Muscles surrounding orbit with lines of action. Left--muscles concerned
in movements of parts round orbits. Right--lines of action of these
muscles indicated by arrows.]
[Illustration: Fig. 21.--C. B. _æt_ 81.
_Hairs_: Thick and bushy eyebrows. At junction of outer and middle
third of each side the thick hairs turn abruptly downwards in a tuft
and cover the upper lid.
_Wrinkles_: Arched and lateral fairly well-marked, one very deep,
central and vertical wrinkle.]
[Illustration: Fig. 22.--G. W. _æt_ 79.
_Hairs_: On each side at junction of outer and middle thirds a definite
wisp of hair turning upwards.
_Wrinkles_: Arched and orbital well-marked, central wrinkles hardly
visible.]
[Illustration: Fig. 23.--F. F. _æt_ 57.
_Hairs_: Left side two long hairs from 1 to 1-1/2 inches long, turned
sharply up at outer end of eyebrow. Right side short hairs turned
upwards.
_Wrinkles_: Strongly marked, curved, orbital wrinkles round outer half
of each orbit. No other wrinkles.]
[Illustration: Fig. 24.--B. W. _æt_ 69.
_Hairs_: on both sides, projecting tufts at junction of the middle
and outer thirds of eyebrows, hairs an inch long. The outer fourth of
surface bare of hair.
_Wrinkles_: Vertical hardly visible. Arched wrinkles numerous and
especially deep towards the temporal region.]
[Illustration: Fig. 25.--T. R. _æt_ 57. Voluble talker, twitches
eyebrows in talking.
_Hairs_: Thick and stand out stiffly from eyebrows, turning slightly
upwards in outer third--almost absent from inner third of surface.
_Wrinkles_: Vertical faint; arched deep and long, equal on the two
sides, orbital, on each side two groups of deep radiating wrinkles,
beside many small lines.]
[Illustration: Fig. 26.--A. P. _æt_ 63.
_Hairs_: On each eyebrow at about the junction of the middle and outer
third, there is a remarkable tuft measuring 1 to 1-1/2 inch projecting
from plane of eyebrow somewhat upwards, scanty hair on outer third.
_Wrinkles_: Smooth open forehead, with moderate-sized arched and
orbital wrinkles. Vertical wrinkles hardly visible.]
[Illustration: Fig. 27.--G. G. _æt_ 54.
_Hairs_: Right eyebrow upward twist of hairs on outer half, left
eyebrow hairs lie straight; project, on both sides, well away from
plane of eyebrow.
_Wrinkles_: Arched on right side more numerous and extending higher
than on left. No vertical wrinkles.]
[Illustration: Fig. 28.--R. N. _æt_ 65.
_Hairs_: On right side hairs long and projecting nearly in horizontal
direction, on left sharply turned up at inner end and rather less so at
outer.
_Wrinkles_: on right sides, three faint arched wrinkles, one vertical,
short and small. On left, three deep arched wrinkles, one vertical,
deep and long.]
A Side-Issue.
This conclusion brings me to the piece of gratuitous advice I offer
to the unmarried reader. It will be more likely to appeal to the
woman than the man, I believe. Let such an one who is contemplating
matrimony make a short study of wrinkles and the long hairs if
possible--unfortunately she cannot do this of her prospective mate if
he be at all young, for neither of these features will be pronounced
as yet. I recommend instead a study of the wrinkles and hairs of the
father and mother and a deliberate summing-up of the evidence in this
way. If she wishes to have a cheery, genial, hopeful companion in
life like B. W. (Fig. 26) let her seek as many arched wrinkles in his
parents as possible and avoid very deep vertical wrinkles. If she be
herself of that disposition she will want a mate of different qualities
and may venture on one whose balance of family wrinkles inclines to the
vertical, _see_ Fig. 28, R. N. She can risk that, and perhaps get a
more capable and strenuous comrade in life’s battle. But let her beware
of him whose wrinkles are all of the vertical kind; for he will be
thoughtful, moody, abstracted and not too good-tempered. I would rather
myself join my fortunes to one who could claim a large share of arched
wrinkles.
[Illustration: Fig. 29.--B. F. _æt_ 52.
_Hairs_: On both sides much twisted downwards, producing shelf over eye.
_Wrinkles_: None on forehead; strongly-marked concentric orbital
wrinkles on both sides.]
After this digression, which follows logically on the facts and
arguments of this chapter I am now in a position to affirm that
_changes in the direction of the hair in the individual can be caused
by muscular action_.