One—­remarkably weak—­explanation has been propounded:  an appeal to our belief in human vanity.  He picked it out by the roots, because he thought he was prettier without.  But that is no reason at all.  Suppose he did, it would not affect his children.  Professor Weismann has at least convinced scientific people of this:  that the characters acquired by a parent are rarely, if ever, transmitted to its offspring.  An individual given to such wanton denudation would simply be at a disadvantage with his decently covered fellows, would fall behind in the race of life, and perish with his kind.  Besides, if man has been at such pains to uncover his skin, why have quite a large number of the most respected among us such a passionate desire to have it covered up again?

Yet that is the only attempted explanation I have ever come upon, and the thing has often worried me.  I think it is just as probably a change in dietary.  I have noticed that most of your vegetarians are shock-headed, ample-bearded men, and I have heard the Ancestor was vegetarian.  Or it may be, I sometimes fancy, a kind of inherent disposition on the part of your human animal to dwindle.  That came back in my memory vividly as I looked at the long rows of Sceptics, typical Advanced people, and marked their glistening crania.  I recalled other losses.  Here is Humanity, thought I, growing hairless, growing bald, growing toothless, unemotional, irreligious, losing the end joint of the little toe, dwindling in its osseous structures, its jawbone and brow ridges, losing all the full, rich curvatures of its primordial beauty.

It seems almost like what the scientific people call a Law.  And by strenuous efforts the creature just keeps pace with his losses—­devises clothes, wigs, artificial teeth, paddings, shoes—­what civilised being could use his bare feet for his ordinary locomotion?  Imagine him on a furze-sprinkled golf links.  Then stays, an efficient substitute for the effete feminine backbone.  So the thing goes on.  Long ago his superficies became artificial, and now the human being shrinks like a burning cigar, and the figure he has abandoned remains distended with artificial ashes, dead dry protections against the exposures he so unaccountably fears.  Will he go on shrinking, I wonder?—­become at last a mere lurking atomy in his own recesses, a kind of hermit crab, the bulk of him a complex mechanism, a thing of rags and tatters and papier-mache, stolen from the earth and the plant-world and his fellow beasts?  And at last may he not disappear altogether, none missing him, and a democracy of honest machinery, neatly clad and loaded up with sound principles of action, walk to and fro in a regenerate world?  Thus it was my mind went dreaming in St. George’s Hall.  But presently, as I say, came the last word about stomachs, and the bald men woke up, rattled their umbrellas, said it was vastly interesting, and went toddling off home in an ecstasy of advanced Liberalism.  And we two returned to the place whence we came.