296 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



mankind. Professor Broca, in bis scale of colors of eyes, arranges 

 shades of orange, green, blue, and violet-gray. But one has only to 

 look closely into any eye to see the impossibility of recording its com- 

 plex pattern of colors ; indeed, what is done is to observe it from a 

 distance, so that its tints blend into one uniform hue. It need hardly 

 be said that what are popularly called black eyes are far from having the 

 iris really black like the pupil ; eyes described as black are commonly 

 of the deepest shades of brown or violet. These so-called black eyes 

 are by far the most numerous in the world, belonging not only to 

 brown-black, brown, and yellow races, but even prevailing among the 

 darker varieties of the white race, such as Greeks and Spaniards. In 

 races with the darker skin and black hair, the darkest eyes generally 

 prevail, while a fair complexion is usually accompanied by the lighter 

 tints of iris, especially blue. 



From ancient times, the color and form of the hair have been 

 noticed as distinctive marks of race. Thus Strabo mentions the 

 Ethiopians as black men with woolly hair, and Tacitus describes 

 the German warriors of his day w^ith their fierce blue eyes and tawny 

 hair. As to color of hair, the most usual is black, or shades so dark 

 as to be taken for black, which belongs not only to the dark-skinned 

 Africans and Americans, but to the yellow Chinese and the dark- 

 whites, such as Hindoos or Jews. In the fair-white peoples of North- 

 ern Europe, on the contrary, flaxen or chestnut hair prevails. Thus 

 we see that there is a connection between fair hair and fair skin, and 

 dark hair and dark skin. But it is impossible to lay down a rule 

 for intermediate tints, for the red-brown or auburn hair common in 

 fair-skinned peoples occurs among darker races, and dark-brown hair 

 has a still wider range. Our own extremely mixed nation shows every 



/' \ 



Fig. 7. Sections of Haik, highly magnified (after Primer), a, Japanese ; b, German ; c, Af- 

 rican negro ; d, Papuan. 



variety, from flaxen and golden to raven black. As to the form of the 

 hair, its well-known differences may be seen in the female portraits in 

 Fig. 5, where the Africans on the left show the woolly or frizzy kind, 

 where the hair naturally curls into little corkscrew spirals, while the 

 Asiatic and American heads on the right have straight hair like a 

 horse's mane. Between these extreme kinds are the flowing or wavy 

 hair, and the curly hair which Avinds in large spirals ; the English hair 

 in the figure is rather of the latter variety. If cross-sections of single 

 hairs are examined under the microscope, their differences of form are 

 seen as in four of the sections by Pruner-Bey (Fig. 7). The almost 



