Incidental Thoughts on a Bald Head

I was asked to go, quite suddenly, and found myself there before I had
time to think of what it might be. I understood her to say it was a
meeting of some "Sunday society," some society that tried to turn the
Sabbath from a day of woe to a day of rejoicing. "St. George's Hall,
Langham Place," a cab, and there we were. I thought they would be
picturesque Pagans. But the entertainment was the oddest it has ever
been my lot to see, a kind of mystery. The place was dark, except for a
big circle of light on a screen, and a dismal man with a long stick was
talking about the effects of alcohol on your muscles. He talked and
talked, and people went to sleep all about us. Euphemia's face looked so
very pretty in the dim light that I tried to talk to her and hold her
hand, but she only said "Ssh!" And then they began showing pictures on
the screen--the most shocking things!--stomachs, and all that kind of
thing. They went on like that for an hour, and then there was a lot of
thumping with umbrellas, and they turned the lights up and we went home.
Curious way of spending Sunday afternoon, is it not?

But you may imagine I had a dismal time all that hour. I understood the
people about me were Sceptics, the kind of people who don't believe
things--a singular class, and, I am told, a growing one. These excellent
people, it seems, have conscientious objections to going to chapel or
church, but at the same time the devotional habit of countless
generations of pious forerunners is strong in them. Consequently they
have invented things like these lectures to go to, with a professor
instead of a priest, and a lantern slide of a stomach by way of
altar-piece; and alcohol they make their Devil, and their god is
Hygiene--a curious and instructive case of mental inertia. I understand,
too, there are several other temples of this Cult in London--South Place
Chapel and Essex Hall, for instance, where they worship the Spirit of
the Innermost. But the thing that struck me so oddly was the number of
bald heads glimmering faintly in the reflected light from the lantern
circle. And that set me thinking upon a difficulty I have never been
able to surmount.

You see these people, and lots of other people, too, believe in a thing
they call Natural Selection. They think, as part of that belief, that
men are descended from hairy simian ancestors; assert that even a
hundred thousand years ago the ancestor was hairy--hairy, heavy, and
almost as much a brute as if he lived in Mr. Arthur Morrison's
Whitechapel. For my own part I think it a pretty theory, and would
certainly accept it were it not for one objection. The thing I cannot
understand is how our ancestor lost that hair. I see no reason why he
should