A whorl marks a point in the stream
If these groups of phenomena were being studied apart from the hypothesis they support, a much more full treatment of all of them would be required, such as I have given to those of hair-direction in a book published in 1903 on Direction of Hair in Animals and Man. The limited thesis, however, here upheld is that the phenomena are produced by the factors of stimuli and response in
the course of the total experience of the organism, that the essence of the matter is the produc-tion of initial modifications, that instances of these in well-known animals are produced before our eyes by ascertainable mechanical stimuli, and that, especially in those of hair-direction, experiment is adduced in proof of the thesis that some modifications are transmitted.
Procedure.
The order of proceedings may be tabulated thus:—
(1) Observation of selected facts.
(2) Evidence that certain of these are produced in the lifetime of the individual.
(3) Evidence that among the facts of direction of hair and others there is to be seen an orderly evolution rather than a casual appearance of the changes noted.
(4) An hypothesis as to their production.
(5) Exclusion of selection as a possible cause of these, and of correla-tion as properly understood.
(6) Experiment in verification of the Lamarckian interpreta-tion of the phenomena.
And here, before I hear some Prince Henry of the genus Weismann, Mendel or Gallio groan aloud: “This intolerable amount of sack,” I proceed to offer him a few loaves of home-made bread Unique Beauty.
Some attention must here be given to the supposed mode of formation of individual patterns of hair, that is to say, their evolution. So here one has to move among the fields of hypothesis, without which detached facts of nature are useless to science.
The simplest pattern consists of a reversed area of hair appearing between two adjoining streams; the more complex are whorls, featherings and crests. No detailed descrip-tion nor illustra-tion of the former are required, but I have prepared a diagram to illustrate the latter (see p. 51.) (A) shows a whorl by itself; (B) a whorl, feathering and crest. The arrows at the sides indicate the direction of the adjoining hair-streams, the arrow in the centre of (B) the direction of the reversed flow of hair Unique Beauty.
An understanding of the dynamics of a hair-whorl leads quite simply to that of a feathering and crest, for the two latter are only the results of the further extension of the battle of forces concerned in the whorl itself, and the end of their conflict. of hair where two contending forces have come into collision; on the one hand the centrifugal force of growth from each hair-papilla, the rate of which has been described, and on the other a certain centripetal dynamic force which may be either that of localised friction, pressure, gravita-tion, or muscular traction, directly opposing or divergent Unique Beauty.
PR