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
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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