One can imagine him running his hand through it admiringly in front of a mirror, De Niro style, his dowdy white wig cast aside and his true macho, army general colors shining through:

"You talkin' to me, King George? Well, I'm the only one standin' here - the Big Dog Daddy of a new nation."

Such are the odd musings that can be inspired by an even odder collection of historical ephemera scheduled to be on display at the Academy of Natural Sciences this Presidents' Day weekend:

The hair of U.S. presidents.

In possession of a leather-bound scrapbook of hair from the heads of the first 12 chief executives, the Academy plans to exhibit four samples tomorrow, Sunday and Monday: Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and John Quincy Adams.

What's next? Bodily fluids of the Senate? Fingernails of Civil War generals?

The hair was collected by a Philadelphia lawyer and amateur naturalist named Peter Arvell Browne (1762-1860), who filled 12 volumes with samples of human and animal hair from around the world.

Passionate and peculiar, Browne was somewhat hair obsessed, according to Robert Peck, the erudite, white-haired curator of art and artifacts at the Academy.

Still, Browne did successfully study sheep hair, which helped form the principles that guide the wool industry to this very day, Peck said.

And he correctly guessed that some American Indian hair was similar to Siberian hair. This would later be scientifically verified, proof that so-called Native Americans had ancestors in what is now Russia.

With the presidents - and with Napoleon Bonaparte, whose brown, baby-fine locks are also part of the Academy's shaggy collection - Browne was hoping to learn whether great leaders had common characteristics that manifested themselves in hair, or "pile," as he called it.

Here, Browne was significantly off base, said Peck. "You can't draw any such conclusions about hair and leadership," he said.

And when you think about it, our presidents had such varying tresses.

Bill Clinton was a great-maned president, especially compared with Richard Nixon's Nowhere Man look. Gerald Ford and Dwight Eisenhower were bald, James K. Polk sported a kind of mullet, and Lincoln added a beard.

People say Andrew Jackson had the best presidential hair, as evidenced by its thick and wild appearance on the 20-dollar bill.

Browne, in fact, asked Jackson for hair for his collection, but the president demurred, explaining that he'd just gotten a haircut, Peck said.

It wasn't hard for Browne to acquire the hair, Peck said. According to the style of the times, most people kept multiple locks of cut hair for keepsakes or to give to loved ones.

Browne simply wrote letters to living presidents as well as to the families of dead ones. Most complied.

The Academy is saying it will consider scientific requests to study the hair, but it isn't clear how much can actually be learned.

Hair is dead, and without attached follicles, it doesn't contain the right kind of DNA to allow a researcher to study the characteristics of its owner, said Lawrence Kobilinsky, chairman of the department of forensic science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

(So much for the hope of cloning the brilliant redhead Thomas Jefferson or, for sheer laughs, good ol' Franklin Pierce, the very distant relative of President Bush's mother, and a Confederacy-supporting alcoholic with a thick, brown mop.)

"Basically, hair can't tell you much about a person," Kobilinsky said.

Still, you can learn a few things.

It is said Napoleon was poisoned, and the Academy hair could have something like arsenic in it, which can be detected, said Lawrence Presley, a scientist at Arcadia University in Montgomery County, and a former hair and fiber examiner and DNA expert for the FBI.

Also, if any president was abusing drugs such as cocaine, his hair would bust him, Presley said.

The Browne hair can also reveal whether a president used dye, which could seriously wound all those Ronald Reagan apologists who still insist that septuagenarian black was his real hair color. (His hair, by the way, is being sold on eBay, Peck said, "collected by a former barber.")

The Academy hair isn't the only grouping of leader locks; the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution has a framed collection of hair from Washington to Pierce.

But that museum will be closed until fall. For now, Philadelphia is the presidential hair mecca.

"It is an awesome sort of sight," Peck said. "Pieces of presidents. It makes them feel real. And it's the closest I'll get to them."

If You Go

The Academy of Natural Sciences will be displaying the hair from four U.S. presidents tomorrow through Monday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tickets cost $10 for adults (over 13) and $8 for children (ages 3 through 12), seniors, students and military.

The Academy is located at 19th Street and Ben Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia. For more information, visit www.ansp.org

'Ends of the Earth'

The Academy's new exhibit, "Ends of the Earth: From Polar Bears to Penguins," explores a wide swath of nature at both poles. In Monday's Health & Science section.

Watch a video about the findings at http://go.philly.com/hair