188 Idle Days in Patagonia. 
Europe, having been, until recent times, almost or 
quite universal. The blue eye does not seem to 
have any advantage for man ina state of nature, 
being mild where fierceness of expression is re- 
quired ; it is almost unknown amongst the inferior 
creatures; and only on the supposition that the 
appearance of the eye is less important to man’s 
welfare than it is to that of other species, can we 
account for its survival in a branch of the human 
race. 
Cerulean eyes; locks comparable in hue to the 
* yellow hair that floats on the eastern clouds,” and 
a white body, like snow with a blush on it—what 
could Nature have been dreaming of when she gave 
such things to her rudest most savage humans! 
That they should have overcome dark-eyed races, 
and trod on their necks and ruined their works, 
strikes one as unnatural, and reads like a fable. 
Little, however, as the human eye has changed, 
assuming it to have been dark originally, there is a 
great deal of spontaneous variation in individuals, 
light hazel and blue-grey being apparently the most 
variable. I have found curiously marked and 
spotted eyes not uncommon ; in some instances the 
spots being so black, round, and large as to produce 
the appearance of eyes with clusters of pupils on 
them. J have known one person with large brown 
spots on light blue-grey eyes, whose children all 
inherited the peculiarity ; also another with reddish 
hazel irides thickly marked with fine characters 
resembling Greek letters. This person was an 
