PIGMENTATION IN OLD AMERICANS HRDLICKA. 



453 



Color of hair and eyes in subjects with slcin perceptibly darker than medium 

 compared with that in the series at large. 



[Percental relation to proportion in the whole series.] 



Among those with darker skins there are, in respect to hair, no 

 blonds or reds, only a little over one-fifth as many light browns, and 

 approximately one-half as many medium browns as in the Old Ameri- 

 cans taken as a whole, but nearly three times as many darks to blacks. 

 As to eyes, the darker-skinned show one-fourth to one-third less 

 lights but more than twice as many browns, two to three times as 

 many light browns, over twice as many mediums, and over once to 

 twice and a half as many darks. A greater tendency to eye pigmenta- 

 tion is once more apparent here in the women. 



The meaning of these conditions tends to be that a normally 

 darker skin in the American and doubtless other whites is generally 

 an expression of not a localized but a systemic tendency toward 

 darker pigmentation, and as such is probably of phylogenetic rather 

 than ontogenetic significance; that it is, in other words, a survival 

 of a darker ancestry rather than an individual peculiarity. Just how 

 much more or less of the darker skins there are in the Old Americans 

 than among other whites we shall only be able to tell from similar 

 studies among these other groups. 



The " Scotch skin " is a medium white skin with numerous light 

 and rather large and irregular " freckles" on the exposed parts. On 

 the face these " freckles " extend to the forehead. It is highly charac- 

 teristic of a proportion of persons of Scotch derivation and that 

 anions: the Old as well as recent Americans. The subject deserves a 

 detailed study of its own. As already mentioned, there is a strong 

 indication that these " freckles " are merely the remnants of a darker- 

 skinned strain admixed in the dim past into the Scotch people. 



THE HAIR. 



The records on pigmentation of the hair are much more numerous 

 and comprehensive than those on the skin. They apply to 1,009 men 

 and 914 women. 



The method, based on considerable experience and preliminary 

 work, was to subdivide the large range of colors into as few as pos- 

 sible definite classes, and then to use common sense, with good indirect 

 101257—23 30 



