Man Lost Covering of Hair When He Stopped Eating Buds.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 29 May 1914, Page 2

Man Lost Covering of Hair When He Stopped Eating Buds.

(By PROF. E. BERGFIELD, BER-

LIN, GERMANY.)

Clothing has had little to do with man's loss of hairy covering, as appears from a comparison of clothed I and unclothed men in the same lati- ■ tndes. Hair is a horny growth, just like j feathers, wool, nails, hoofs, claws, ! and horns, requiring silicious earth \ lor its formation. All animals with. I great horn development feed upon food rich in silicates, especially grass—for example, horned cattle, deer, elephants, who have not only great tusks, but horny hides. Birds, which require a large amount of silicates for their dietary by eating sand and gravel. The wonderful digestive power of the fowl's gizzard :is well known. Italian investigators have found massive glass balls crushed to powder in the gizzards of fowls. Spallanzani experimented with a turkey-cock, feeding him with twelve sharp steel points in an electuary, or cake, and he found after eighteen hours, when he opened the gizzard, that the little blades were, broken" up and crushed, and not one had even scraped the interior of the gizzard. Since it is plain that food rich in silicates produces horny growths of all kinds, whether feathers or hair, it is plain that food which is poor in silicates tends to reduce the formation of horny substance in animal or man, thus reducing the strength of the bones, causing rick-. ets, and in hens, causing them to; lay eggs with leathery shells. That in sheep a change of diet produces1 loss of growth of wool has been1 proved by taking sheep from Tripoli to Fessan, wliere after two years they almost altogether lost their wool. In Fessan they did not find the luxuriant grass towhich they had been accustomed, for in Fessan every one lives on dates —camels, horses, dogs even, and man. That our domestic swine, which are descended from the hairy bristled wild hogs, become almost hairless; can be attributed to the change. from the natural food, consisting of fruits, nuts, and roots to the food we give our domestic swine, which, consists so largely of milk, and has salt added thereto, the great bleacher. It is, therefore, more than, suggested that man' became naked, and lost most of his hairy covering because his food lacks silicates. In prehistoric ages, when fruits had not ideveloped their fine taste or been cultivated (by main to that- end, prehistoric man, like the anthropoid apes of our. day, ate largely of vegetables, buds, and young twigs. Prehistoric man supplied his system with silicates through these buds, twigs, and roots, but as fruits developed their finer flavour man ate more of these and less of the more tasteless herbs and twigs, i thus diminishing the supply of silicates and at the same time decreasing his hairy covering. When they ate only the inside of the barumas and threw away the skins, they threw away their own skin-covering at the same cime. They began to supply something oi the silicate to the human system again when man began to eat wheat and grains of other kinds and for this reason the white races of Europe have more of a hairy covering than negroes, Malays, and Indians. But, as of late the Europeans are ceasing to eat whole-wheat bread—making their bread chiefly of the inside of the grains and omitting the rich outside so full of silicates, the hairy covering is being affected, even so ' far as to increase the tendency to baldness and thinness of hair on the head. The thinning of the hair in prehistoric man began first on the stomach side, which was less exposed to irritation by sun and rain than the back, as it was natural to protect the face from the play of the elements. Among many savage nations it is the pi actice to pull out the hair on the face by the roots, and especially is this the case with the women. The persistence in this practice through generations resulted in the weakening and final destruction cf these organs in the skin which tend to produce hair, this accounting for the general beardlossnoss of women. —"London Budget."