CONSOLATION FOR THE BALD.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1625, 25 August 1887, Page 3

CONSOLATION FOR THE BALD.

Those excellent people who do not like allusions to be made to the baldness of themselves or of their friends will feel consoled by reading the current number of an American scientific journal containing the report of a lecture on the subject of baldness, delivered by Dr Jackson, of New York, which is summarised in the Standard as follows Old age Dr Jackson regards as the least frequent cause of baldness. The morning tub is far from beneficial to the hair. The hair gets wet too often, and is not dried sufficiently, so that in time this continual sousing, which supplies so agreeable a stimulant to the rest of the system, actually rots the hair and leads to baldness in 85 per cent, of those who practice it. Dr Eaton found in the audiences attendant upon churches and operas in Boston—theology and music being the two grooves in which intellectual ife in that city runs—that from 40 to 50 per cent, of the men are bald. On the other hand, “in cheap museums " where tall men and fat women form the staple objects on exhibition—and at prize fights the proportion of bald men was only from 12 to 20 per cent, of the company. Great scholars and thinkers are often bald. Shakespeare —if the bust at Stratford-on-Avon and the Droeshout portrait prefixed to the first folio are to be taken as evidence—was both fat and bald. Julius Cffisar, a hard-living, hardfighting, hard thinking man, was, like so many of the Roman Emperors, bald. Chaucer had a kindness to bald men. Aristophanes, the greatest master of Greek comedy, was bald; po was Socrates, if tradition and his busts do not lie; and we all know that iEachylus was popularly supposed to have been killed by an eagle trying to crack a tortoise on his bare crown. It is, therefore, clear that the bald men have plenty of great people to keep them company. The Coming Man is to be quite bald, and the ladies are to like him all the better for it. The hair scalp is a remnant of pristine animality, which is to be shuffled off, just as Darwin tells us we have shed the peline pelt which was the clothing of that ancestral ape over whose pithecoid propensities the world has had so much to say. The balder the man is the more advanced his stage of evolution.