A major characteristic of primates is that their fingers and toes terminate in nails rather than in claws. One can speculate that the development of nails into flattened plates reflects the discontinuation of their use for digging or for defending and attacking. In a broad sense, nails are analogous to hair, having similar composition (keratin) and some common structural features. Even their genesis and mode of growth are comparable, but not identical, to those of hair.

Although apparently simple structures, nails are formed by complex and still poorly understood structural entities referred to as nail organs. Unlike hair, nails grow continuously, with no normal periods of rest; if their free edges were protected from wear, they would extend to prodigious lengths, growing in a twisted fashion like a ram’s horns. Nails grow about 0.1 millimetre per day, or roughly one-third as rapidly as hair. Growth is somewhat slower in winter than in summer and slower in infants and old people than in vigorous young adults. It requires about three months for a whole nail to replace itself.

A number of factors can alter normal nail growth, among them age, trauma, poisons, and organic disorders. Habitual nail biting speeds up growth, and certain occupational practices can cause an increase in thickness. The nail-forming organ is particularly sensitive to physiological changes. During stressful periods or prolonged fever, or in response to noxious drugs, nails may become cracked, thinner, thicker, furrowed, or otherwise deformed, or they may be shed. Such sensitivity of response should make nails relatively good indexes of the health of individuals. But because of their ready response to so many internal and external factors, and because changes in them often occur without a known reason, signs of abnormality can be misleading or difficult to interpret. Like hair, the visible part of the nail plate is a dead structure. Defects inflicted upon it by mechanical means that do not disturb the underlying living tissue are eventually cast off at the free border.

Nails have a root, buried beneath the skin; a plate that is firmly attached to a nail bed underneath; and a free edge. Depending upon its thickness and the quality of its surface, the nail plate may be pink or whitish; the nail itself is translucent and colourless, allowing the colour of the blood in the superficial capillaries of the nail bed to show through. At its base the nail plate may have a whitish, arched marking called a lunule. Always present on thumbnails, lunules may be present or absent on the other fingers and are nearly always absent on the little finger. There are variations in different individuals and even between the two hands of the same person; such variations are probably controlled by genetic factors.

The nail itself consists of firmly cemented keratinized cells, flattened horizontally to the surface. Whereas the surface of nail plates may appear to be smooth, it is lined by parallel, longitudinal furrows, more strongly etched in some persons than in others and typically more prominent in the aged. These markings have some correspondence to the more pronounced grooves and ridges on the undersurface of the plate.

Nails grow from a matrix at the base of the nail root. During the early part of their journey, matrix cells multiply and move forward, synthesizing keratin, underneath the fold of skin (eponychium) at the base of the nail. Once exposed to the surface, the nail is fully formed. The nail plate seems to glide over the nail bed, but it is firmly attached to it; the entire tissue, nail bed and plate, most likely moves forward as a unit. The nail bed has often been called sterile matrix, since it adds little or nothing to the nail plate. Yet under certain pathologic conditions, it assumes keratinizing activities that result in a variably thickened or deformed nail plate.

Although less effective than claws for digging or gouging, the flattened nail is still an excellent adaptation that has added much to the development of manipulative skills. Nails not only protect the tips of fingers but also give them firmness and the ability to pick up or make contact with minute objects. Claws would be useless for such functions.

Cutaneous sense organs

The skin has both free nerve endings and so-called corpuscular endings, which include nonnervous elements. The corpuscular endings are further differentiated as encapsulated or nonencapsulated receptors.

Free nerve endings occur in the epidermis, in the superficial dermis, where they are arranged in tufts, and in hair follicles. Merkel cells, which are found in the basal layer of the epidermis, are an example of nonencapsulated corpuscular receptors. The most striking example of an encapsulated receptor is the Pacinian corpuscle, an ovoid structure that is about one millimetre in length and lamellated in section, like an onion; these receptors can be found deep in the dermis. Various other dermal sense organs—for example, Golgi-Mazzoni corpuscles, Krause end bulbs, Meissner corpuscles, and Ruffini endings—have also been described.

It can easily be demonstrated that touch, cold, warmth, and pain are each perceived in separate points on the skin surface. The various end organs were at one time, therefore, somewhat arbitrarily assigned as monitors of one or another of these qualities. A difficulty was that many of the receptors are present only in glabrous skin, even though hairy skin in similarly perceptive. These earlier ideas were undoubtedly too simple, but electrophysiologists have confirmed the view that the various end organs respond to specific stimuli. The functional existence of mechanoreceptors, thermoreceptors, and pain receptors has been established, though only some of these can be identified with classical end organs. The Merkel cells and Ruffini endings, for example, are “slowly adapting” mechanoreceptors; while the Meissner, Pacinian, and Golgi-Mazzoni corpuscles and the hair follicle receptors are “rapidly adapting” mechanoreceptors.