3 88 SCIENCE PROGRESS. 



yellow hair, like the Irish". The Irish colony about Dinas 

 Mawddwy, in Merioneth, were called "the red men of 

 Mawddwy". It is probable that the ruling tribes of 

 Ireland had much more of the blond element than the 

 servile ones ; 1 and that the former were exhausted by the 

 long wars with the English, by the military emigrations to 

 France and Spain, and perhaps the earlier emigrations to 

 America. Dr. Morton, the first great American anthropo- 

 logist, in describing the Irish as he saw them, said "eyes 

 and hair light ". But there is no doubt that, speaking 

 broadly, there is more dark hair in Ireland than in Eng- 

 land or Scotland, though there are more dark eyes in 

 England. The climate of Ireland, cloudy, moist and 

 temperate, should favour the depigmentation of the eye by 

 natural selection, and I have pointed out that the English 

 colonists of Ireland by mixing their blood with that of the 

 natives have changed their own type more in the direction 

 of lightness of eye than of darkness of hair. 



Mr. Galton has pointed out how rapidly a community 

 in which the age of marriage is late would, under like 

 circumstances, be crowded out or superseded by one in 

 which that age is some years earlier. This consideration 

 is one of several which account for the rapid extinction of 

 upper class families in these islands, while the proletariat 

 multiplies with inconvenient rapidity ; and as the blond 

 type is more prevalent in the upper than in the lower classes, 

 it also is probably in process of diminution. If, however, 

 it can be shown that the blond is more subject, in this 

 country, to diseases of such a nature as to shorten life, and 

 reduce the duration of the period of child-bearing and child- 

 begetting, this same result would follow. Now there is a 

 good deal of evidence as to the greater liability of blonds 

 to certain classes of disease (in America at least), in 

 Baxter's great work on the medical statistics of the Civil 

 War. There are certain possible fallacies which may 

 underlie Baxter's figures, to some of which De Candolle 



1 Thus MacFirbis, in a well-known passage, describes the Tuatha De 

 Danaan as fair, and the Milesians as "white of skin, brown of hair," but 

 the Firbolgs as a servile race, and black-haired. 



