'^G'2 VARIETIES OF COLOUR 



spotted animals. Persons of the black races are sometimes 

 marked by patches of white, of various size and number, 

 without any thing like disease of the skin. This circum- 

 stance has been observed most frequently in Negroes, and 

 generally begins in early infancy ; the individuals are called 

 spotted or piebald Negroes, in French, Negres-pies. Blu- 

 MENBACH has dcscribcd a man of this kind, whom he saw 

 in London ; a servant to the person who kept the animals 

 at Exeter Change. He was a young man perfectly black, 

 excepting the umbilical and hypogastric regions of the abdo- 

 men, and the middle of the lower limbs, including the knees 

 and neighbouring parts of the thighs and legs, which were 

 of a clear and almost snowy whiteness, but spotted with 

 black, like the skin of a panther. His hair was of two co- 

 lours. On the middle of the front of the head, from the 

 vertex to the forehead, where it ended in a sharp point, there 

 was a white spot, with a yellower tinge than those on the 

 trunk and legs. The hair covering this was white, but re- 

 sembled the rest in other respects *. On comparing the 

 picture of this man with three others (a boy and two girls), 

 he observes that the white spots occupied the abdomen and 

 thighs, never appearing on the hands and feet, which parts, 

 with the groins, are the first to turn black in the newly-born 

 Negroes ; and that the arrangement of the white parts was 

 symmetrical. Both the parents of this man, and of the 

 others f, of whom Blumenbach had collected accounts, 

 were entirely black ; so that Buffon's conjecture of this 



* De G.II. Var. Nat. sect. iii. \ 4S. Abbildimgcn natur-historischer Gegen- 

 stanch; No 21. Another spotted Negro is delineated in Buffon, Supplement, 

 t. iv.p.565, tab. ii. 



t Byrd, in the Philos. Transact, v. xix, p. 7SI, mentions a boy, in whom 

 the spots were first seen in the fourth year, and progressively increased. Mr. 

 Jefferson mentions a Negro, born black of black parents, on whose chin, 

 when a boy, a white spot appeared. It continued to increase till he became 

 a man, when it had extended over the chin, lips, one cheek, the under jaw, 

 and neck of the same side. Notes on Virginia, p. 120. Another case is 

 mentioned by Morgan in Transactions of the Philosophical Society of Phila- 

 delphia, V. ii. p. 392. 



