With the hair the case is different. It goes, not merely because its mandate is exhausted, but because it is really detrimental to us in the struggle for existence. Its departure is an instance, pure and simple of the survival of the fittest. Little reflection is required to show the superior fitness of the man that is bald. Baldness is respectability, baldness is piety, rectitude and general worth. Persons holding responsible and well-salaried positions are commonly bald—bank presidents especially. The prosperous merchant is usually of shining pate; the heads of most of the great corporations are thinly thatched. Of two otherwise equal applicants for a position of trust and profit, who would not instinctively choose the bald one, or, both being bald, the balder? Having, therefore, a considerable advantage, the bald person naturally lives longer than his less gifted competitor (any one can observe that he is usually the older) and leaves a more numerous progeny, inheriting the paternal endowment of precarious hair. In a few generations more those varieties of our species known as the Mophead and the Curled Darling will doubtless have become extinct, and the barber (_Homo loquax_) will have followed them into oblivion. Another German physician (named Müller—the German physician who is not named Müller has had a narrow escape) points out the increasing prevalence of baldness and declares it hereditary. That many human beings are born partly bald is not, I take it, what he means, but that the tendency to lose the hair early in life is transmitted from father to son. It is understood that the ladies have nothing to do with the matter; they are never bald, but the hair of none of them, I understand, is so long and thick as it once was. It is difficult to offset such facts as these with facts of a contrary sort. Cowboys and artists—sometimes poets—are found with long hair, but long hair is not thought to be an advantage to them, if, indeed, any hair at all is. For wiping the bowie-knife, the paint brush or the pen, hair, no doubt, is useful, but hardly more so than the coat-sleeve. Even in these instances, then, where at first thought there might seem to be a relation of cause and effect between length of hair and length of life, the appearance is fallacious. A bald-headed cowboy would, however, be less liable to scalping by the Red Man. It appears, then, that Dr. Müller’s cheerful prediction regarding the heads of Posterity rests upon a foundation of truth.