The Making of Species 
their wives, nor do they refuse to mate with 
very tall or very short women.” As _ regards 
eye-colour, Pearson seems to have arrived at 
somewhat more definite results. ‘We con- 
clude,” he writes (p. 428), “that in mankind 
there certainly exists a preferential mating in the 
matter of eye-colour, or of some closely allied 
character in the male; in the case of the female 
there also appears to be some change of type due 
to preferential mating. . . . The general tendency 
is for lighter-eyed to mate, the darker-eyed being 
relatively less frequently mated.” 
But Pearson’s experiments seem to show that 
as regards stature and eye-colour there is “a 
quite sensible tendency of like to mate with 
like.” ‘In fact,’ writes Pearson, “husband and 
wife for one of these characters are more alike 
than uncle and niece, and for the other more 
alike than first cousins.” He adds, ‘Such a 
degree of resemblance in two mates, which we 
reasonably assume to be not peculiar to man, 
could not fail to be of weight if all the stages 
between like and unlike were destroyed by 
differential selection.” 
Two obvious criticisms of the results obtained 
by Prof. Pearson occur to us. The first is that 
his conclusions do not seem to be in accordance 
with the popular notion that fair-haired men 
prefer dark hair in a woman, while dark-haired 
men prefer fair-haired women, and vzce versa. 
310 
