60 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1744'. 



swarthy, even at this day; in which there is some degree of blackness ; or at 

 least this may well be said to be a tendency to their primitive swarthy complex- 

 ions. So that if the heat of the sun will turn a white skin swarthy, as nobody in 

 hot countries can doubt, the same cause might turn the swarthy and tawny black ; 

 for the effect seems to be the same in one as in the other, and may therefore be 

 produced by one and the same cause. As for the black people recovering, iu the 

 same manner, their primitive swarthy colours of their fore-fathers, by removing 

 from their intemperate scorching regions, it must be observed, that there is a 

 great difference in the different ways of changing colours to one another : thus 

 dyers am very easily dye any white cloth black, but cannot so easily discharge 

 that black, and bring it to its first colour : and thus, though the skins of white, 

 or even swarthy people, are easily affected by the greater power of the sun's 

 beams than what they have been used to, and thereby become black ; yet they 

 are thereby rendered so thick and hard, or tough and callous, as not to be so 

 easily affected, or readily wrought on, to render them again of their original 

 swarthy or pale colour, by any of those causes, as the absence of the sun, cold- 

 ness of the climate, or ways of life in it, which we have supposed to be the causes 

 of the fair complexions of the Europeans ; though probably it has never been 

 tried what effect these luxurious customs, or soft and effeminate lives, which we 

 have supposed to be the causes of mankind's turning to so tender and delicate 

 complexions as the Europeans have, and to be the cause of all whiteness in the 

 complexions of men, or changes from a dark to a fairer complexion, might have 

 on the colour of negroes ; but this we are assured of, that they are not of so deep 

 a black, in cold northern, as in the hotter southerly regions. Besides, we want 

 not some convincing instances, from the gleanings of a few historians, to show 

 that such changes have happened in the memory of men, and within the compass 

 of those records we have of time ; for we could not suppose it to have happened 

 all at once : thus Herodotus tells us, that the Colchi were formerly black, with 

 frizzled hair ; which he says he relates rather as a thing well known before, than 

 a bare report ; but there is no sign of any blackness in the complexions of their 

 descendants, they being rather, especially about Circassia, reckoned some of the 

 fairest people in the world at this day. Captain Smith tells us, that, even in 

 Virginia, an Englishman, by living only 3 years among the Indians, became 

 " so like an Indian, in habit and complexion, that he knew him only by his 

 tongue :" and what might his children have turned to in a succession of many 

 generations, by these same ways of life, which had so altered him in 3 years? 

 The Moors and Lybians, being driven out of Africa, on the Turkish conquest, 

 retired to the land of the negroes ; but are no more to be found there of their 

 original tawny colour. The king of Gualata is supposed to be lineally descended 

 from these tawny Moors, but is even blacker than the original negroes. The 



