By George W. Rutler Dr. Martin Routh, president of Magdalen College for 63 years, was the last Oxford don to wear a wig in the 18th- century style, and this he did until he died in his 100th year in 1854. He had been born on the 25th anniversary of the death of Peter the Great, who banned beards from the imperial court while tolerating court wigs. As St. Petersburg is the Liverpool of Russia, it is intriguing to learn from philologists that the local Liverpudlian accent pronounces hair and heir and hairpiece and herpes the same.
Received opinion is that hair loss is in proportion to intelligence.
One thinks just off the top of one s head of William Shakespeare, William Cullen Bryant, Herbert Spencer, Octave Cremazie, Wilbur Wright, and Dwight David Eisenhower. The bearded Bard of Avon seems to have been a bit defensive about his alopecia, for he says in his Comedy of Errors , There s many a man hath more hair than wit. It may well be that incorporeal angels would appear to us as totally bald by virtue of their perfect intelligence. Hair is a liability. Absalom, never to be equated in IQ with the angels, was doomed when his rampant follicles got caught up the branches of an oak tree.