but as to their colour, it is the nature of the skin that is the cause of this in other animals and also of their being uni-coloured or vari-coloured); but in man it is not the cause, except of the hair going grey through disease (not through old age), for in what is called leprosy the hairs become white; on the contrary, if the hairs are white the whiteness does not invade the skin. the reason is that the hairs grow out of skin; if, then, the skin is diseased and white the hair becomes diseased with it, and the disease of hair is greyness. but the greyness of hair which is due to age results from weakness and deficiency of heat. for as the body declines in vigour we tend to cold at every time of life, and especially in old age, this age being cold and dry. we must remember that the nutriment coming to each part of the body is concocted by the heat appropriate to the part; if the heat is inadequate the part loses its efficiency, and destruction or disease results. (we shall speak more in detail of causes in the treatise on growth and nutrition.) whenever, then, the hair in man has naturally little heat and too much moisture enters it, its own proper heat is unable to concoct the moisture and so it is decayed by the heat in the environing air. all decay is caused by heat, not the innate heat but external heat, as has been stated elsewhere. and as there is a decay of water, of earth, and all such material bodies, so there is also of the earthy vapour, for instance what is called mould (for mould is a decay of earthy vapour). thus also the liquid nutriment in the hair decays because it is not concocted, and what is called greyness results. it is white because mould also, practically alone among decayed things, is white. the reason of this is that it has much air in it, all earthy vapour being equivalent to thick air. for mould is, as it were, the antithesis of hoar-frost; if the ascending vapour be frozen it becomes hoar-frost, if it be decayed, mould. hence both are on the surface of things, for vapour is superficial. and so the comic poets make a good metaphor in jest when they call grey hairs ‘mould of old age’ and for the one is generically the same as greyness, the other specifically; hoar-frost generically (for both are a vapour), mould specifically (for both are a form of decay). a proof that this is so is this: grey hairs have often grown on men in consequence of disease, and later on dark hairs instead of them after restoration to health. the reason is that in sickness the whole body is deficient in natural heat and so the parts besides, even the very small ones, participate in this weakness; and again, much residual matter is formed in the body and all its parts in illness, wherefore the incapacity in the flesh to concoct the nutriment causes the grey hairs. but when men have recovered health and strength again they change, becoming as it were young again instead of old; in consequence the states change also. indeed, we may rightly call disease an acquired old age, old age a natural disease; at any rate, some diseases produce the same effects as old age.
men go grey on the temples first, because the back of the head is empty of moisture owing to its containing no brain, and the ‘bregma’ has a great deal of moisture, a large quantity not being liable to decay; the hair on the temples however has neither so little that it can concoct it nor so much that it cannot decay, for this region of the head being between the two extremes is exempt from both states. the cause of greyness in man has now been stated.
