These three illustrious men are all more or less inaccurate and incomplete in their descriptions of the hair on man’s forearm, though Romanes[42] gives a drawing which supplements his written account. They looked upon it as a vestige of the pattern of hair on the forearm of existing anthropoid apes, especially the orang, in whom its fully-developed form was an adaptation governed by Natural Selection. Of the three, Wallace is the most uncompromising on behalf of this view, Romanes rather accepts it _en passant_, and Darwin in a long passage[43] adopts it with some reserve and his usual respect for the work of his great co-worker, as the most probable explanation of a fact which lay heavy on his scientific conscience. Indeed, for all these great men it was a _crux_, though Romanes, with his Lamarckian views, need not have found much difficulty with an alternative account of it.[44] [42] _Darwin and after Darwin_, Vol. 1, p. 90. [43] _The Descent of Man_, Chap. VI., p, 151. [44] I may remark that Darwin seems at an earlier date to have made a very curious suggestion in this connection, for Hartmann, in his work on Anthropoid Apes, p. 99, quotes him as saying: “We should, however, bear in mind that the attitude of an animal may perhaps be in part determined by the direction of the hair; and not the direction of the hair by the attitude,” a notion so obviously untenable that it does not appear in the second edition of _The Descent of Man_, 1896. At the time when these statements were made, the lineal ancestors of man were much more definite personages than they are now, as Arthur, the legendary Celtic hero, was formerly held to be an historical personage more than is the case now. These ancestors were generally believed then to be found among the four existing anthropoid apes. The picture of our ancestor among the apes, as given by Wallace, in connection with this state of the hair on his forearm, represents him as spending much of his time like the gorilla, who, according to Livingstone, “sits in pelting rain with his hands over his head.” He would no doubt find the thatch-like arrangement of the hair a tolerably efficient umbrella, but one may doubt very much if so clever a denizen of the tropics would fail to find under the great branches of trees, in a tropical forest, a better covering and one more like the roofs of our houses. But when we cannot find a roof to our heads we--and the orang or gorilla--naturally employ a substitute, and not otherwise. Be that as it may, it is doubtful if the thatch of his forearms would supply him with that survival value on which the theory of Selection depends, to say nothing of the fact that in its incipient stage the reversal of the slope of hair, inherited from the lemur stock, would be trivial and useless.