with the different races of mankind. In fact, human hairs, like that of many mammalia, are not placed at equal distances the one from the other; they approach each other in little groups. This is especially seen in the nape of the neck, and among the Negro race much more so than among the Europeans. This fact, joined to the irregularly prismatic form of the hair in the Negro, is doubtless the origin of the following peculiarity: when the head of a Negro has been shaved, and the hair begins to grow afresh, one is especially struck with its strange appearance. It is arranged in little tufts about the size of a pea, so that the head, it has been remarked,[136] resembles nothing more closely than an old worn-out brush. This peculiarity is special to the Negro, and is not found in the north-east of Africa, where the neighbouring population have _woolly_ hair. Among the enumeration of the numberless perfections which a dogmatic Hindú requires from Buddha, and which Çakhya-Mouni possessed, it is said, “The hair of Buddha shoots forth in little ringlets.”[137] It is impossible to describe better what happens with the Negro. All this Hindoo tradition is, besides, a veritable enigma for the anthropologist. Why is Buddha depicted with the palms of the hands descending to the knees?[138] Why is the mendicant son of a king, born on the banks of the Ganges, always represented with the features or characteristics of a Negro, with black skin, and crisped hair? Nevertheless, Çakhya-Mouni did not belong to these inferior varieties of the human race, of whose existence in the Indian Peninsula we have already spoken; in that case, he would have been unfit to formulate any doctrine, either moral or philosophic. The rest of the pilous system, not less than that of the hair, merits the attention of the anthropologist. Thus, a very especial fact, and to which, in our opinion, sufficient importance has never been attached, is, on the one hand, the relative abundance of the beard among the various races of mankind; and on the other, the time of its development. The Chinese, for example, is for a long time beardless, and it is only about his fortieth year that a few stiff hairs begin to appear upon his face.