A Study of the Structure of Hair with Special Reference to a Negro Child During Its First Five Years of Growth

Many studies have been made on cross section structure of human head hair. Anthropologist have used color, texture, and form of hair as a basis of racial analysis and classification. Brown 1853 (1) showed that the hair of various races of mankind could be classified into three groups with respect to the shapes of the cross section of the shafts: circular, oval, and elliptical. Pruner-Bey 1863 (2) also studied cross section of hair shafts with respect to curliness, kinkiness, waviness and straightness of the hair of various human races. They found the cross section form of wavy hair to have oval shafts, the cross section form of straight hair to have circular shafts and the cross section form of kinky hair was found to have elliptical shafts. In 1884 Waldeyer (3) made a general but not correlative micrological survey of the hairs of representative beast and man by means of crude photomicrography. This was the first successful attempt to use a method of representing the contour of the cuticular scales and medulla of mamalian hair