The term “normal” is a fine field for dialectics, but neither ordinary men nor scientific students can do their work without its use, and yet it would have been an intellectual treat to have heard how Huxley, for example, would have turned inside out any opponent who chose to employ it to his dissatisfaction. In a strictly-conducted tournament no evolutionary biologist would allow its use--to his adversary. A norm for him exists only as one of Professor Karl Pearson’s “conceptual counters,” a piece of mental shorthand or hardly more than a _pis aller_. Among the fundamental conceptions of organic evolution there is one which is almost a truism, the doctrine of Heraclitus, πἁντα ρε̑ι, the everlasting flux and change of Nature and her products. In strict logic, according to what we all now believe, there is no possible norm. All that one may do is to take stock at a certain epoch of evolution and label, for our own convenience, some group, or organism or structure as “normal”--and go on with our business, collecting some specimens, calling them type-specimens, and putting them in books or cases in the Natural History Museum--and then proceed to business. The biological teacher in his class room says he must live, he must have his tools for his work, to which the idle student replies under his breath, “I do not see the necessity,” but then few students are now idle, and this jibe does not sting any one! The examiner must have his normal human anatomy, and would ruthlessly plough any daring examinee who tried to sophisticate the meaning of the term “normal.” I have often been struck with what I must call the intellectual audacity of a most eminent leader in physical science and mathematics, who is not unlike a certain great Church, which grants nothing to her adversaries but is not averse from taking. In his _Grammar of Science_, written with a pen dipped in hydrochloric acid, Professor Karl Pearson four times over, and perhaps more, has the courage to call the human brain in this twentieth century “normal.” Has he never heard of the coming Superman of Mr. Bernard Shaw and other prophets? Thinking _sub specie aeternitatis_ has he here in the West, and at a certain small epoch of time, any right to call the human brain “normal”? I can only long that there may be more normal brains such as Professor Karl Pearson’s, and am almost inclined to echo the prayer of Moses, “Would God all the Lord’s people were [such] prophets”! These comments on the term “normal” imply no complaint against its use, indeed are a claim for it, and I deprecate very much that form of criticism known in boys’ schools, domestic circles, and among politicians as the _tu quoque_ reply, and I hope the few ambiguous terms used in this book will pass the censor, and help the reader. CHAPTER VII. THE EVOLUTION OF PATTERNS OF HAIR.