There seems little doubt that inverted women frequently tend to show minor anomalies of the piliferous system, and especially slight hypertrichosis and a masculine distribution of hair.  Thus in a very typical case of inversion in an Italian girl of 19 who dressed as a man and ran away from home, the down on the arms and legs was marked to an unusual extent, and there was very abundant hair in the armpits and on the pubes, with a tendency to the masculine distribution.[169] Of the three cases described in this chapter which I am best acquainted with, one possesses an unusually small amount of hair on the pubes and in the axillae (oligotrichosis terminalis), approximating to the infantile type, while another presents a complex and very rare piliferous heterogeny.  There is marked dark down on the upper lip; the pubic hair is thick, and there is hair on toes and feet and legs to umbilicus; there are also a few hairs around the nipples.  A woman physician in the United States who knows many female inverts similarly tells me that she has observed the tendency to growth of hair on the legs.  If, as is not improbable, inversion is associated with some abnormal balance in the internal secretions, it is not difficult to understand this tendency to piliferous anomalies; and we know that the thyroid secretion, for instance, and much more the testicular and ovarian secretions, have a powerful influence on the hair.

Ballantyne, some years ago, in discussing congenital hypertrichosis (Manual of Antenatal Pathology, 1902, pp. 321-6) concluded that the theory of arrested development is best supported by the facts; persistence of lanugo is such an arrest, and hypertrichosis may largely be considered a persistence of lanugo.  Such a conclusion is still tenable,—­though it encounters some difficulties and inconsistencies,—­and it largely agrees with what we know of the condition as associated with inversion in women.  But we are now beginning to see that this arrested development may be definitely associated with anomalies in the internal secretions, and even with special chemical defects in these secretions.  Virile strength has always been associated with hair, as the story of Samson bears witness.  Ammon found among Baden conscripts (L’Anthropologie, 1896, p. 285) that when the men were divided into classes according to the amount of hair on body, the first class, with least hair, have the smallest circumference of testicle, the fewest number of men with glans penis uncovered, the largest number of infantile voices, the largest proportion of blue eyes and fair hair, the smallest average height, weight, and chest circumference, while in all these respects the men with hairy bodies were at the other extreme.  It has been known from antiquity that in men early castration affects the growth of hair.  It is now known that in women the presence or absence of the ovary and, other glands affects the hair, as well as sexual development.  Thus Hegar (Beitraege