transmitted by males to their male offspring.

After having shown, to his own satisfaction, how sexual selection would
account for the (supposed) greater strength of the male mind, he turns
his attention to another question, namely, how did man become a hairless
animal? This he accounts for also by sexual selection--the females
preferred the males with the least hair (page 624). In a footnote on
page 625 he says that this view has been harshly criticized. "Hardly any
view advanced in this work," he says, "has met with so much disfavour."
A comment and a question: First, Unless the brute females were very
different from the females as we know them, they would not have agreed
in taste. Some would "probably" have preferred males with less hair,
others, "we may well suppose," would have preferred males with more
hair. Those with more hair would naturally be the stronger because
better able to resist the weather. But, second, how could the males have
strengthened their minds by fighting for the females if, at the same
time, the females were breeding the hair off by selecting the males? Or,
did the males select for three years and then allow the females to do
the selecting during leap year?

But, worse yet, in a later edition published by L.A. Burt Company, a
"supplemental note" is added to discuss two letters which he thought
supported the idea that sexual selection transformed the hairy animal
into the hairless man. Darwin's correspondent (page 710) reports that
a mandril seemed to be proud of a bare spot. Can anything be less
scientific than trying to guess what an animal is thinking about? It
would seem that this also was a subject about which it was "useless to
speculate."

While on this subject it may be worth while to call your attention to