For, though water cools things, the oil mingled with it
prevents the hair from drying quickly, water being easily dried up.
(2) That the process is not a withering, that the hair does not whiten
as grass does by withering, is shown by the fact that some hairs
grow grey from the first, whereas nothing springs up in a withered
state. Many hairs also whiten at the tip, for there is least heat in
the extremities and thinnest parts.
When the hairs of other animals are white, this is caused by nature,
not by any affection. The cause of the colours in other animals is the
skin; if they are white, the skin is white, if they are dark it is
dark, if they are piebald in consequence of a mixture of the hairs, it
is found to be white in the one part and dark in the other. But in man
the skin is in no way the cause, for even white-skinned men have
very dark hair. The reason is that man has the thinnest skin of all
animals in proportion to his size and therefore it has not strength to
change the hairs; on the contrary the skin itself changes its colour
through its weakness and is darkened by sun and wind, while the
hairs do not change along with it at all. But in the other animals the
skin, owing to its thickness, has the influence belonging to the
soil in which a thing grows, therefore the hairs change according to
the skin but the skin does not change at all in consequence of the
winds and the sun.
6
Of animals some are uni-coloured (I mean by this term those of
which the kind as a whole has one colour, as all lions are tawny;
and this condition exists also in birds, fish, and the other classes
of animals alike); others though many-coloured are yet whole-coloured
(I mean those whose body as a whole has the same colour, as a bull is
white as a whole or dark as a whole); others are vari-coloured.
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