THE DESCENT OB ORIGIN OF MAN 259 



Indications go, there seems no foundation for the hypothe- 

 sis that blackness has resulted from the darker and darker 

 individuals having survived better during long exposure 

 to fever-generating miasma. 



Dr. Sharpe remarks," that a tropical sun, which burns 

 and blisters a white skin, does not injure a black one at all ; 

 and, as he adds, this is not due to habit in the individual, 

 for children only six or eight months old are often carried 

 about naked, and are not affected. I have been assured by 

 a medical man that some years ago during each summer, but 

 not during the winter, his hands became marked with light 

 brown patches, like, although larger than freckles, and that 

 these patches were never affected by sun-burning, while the 

 white parts of his skin have on several occasions been much 

 inflamed and blistered. With the lower animals there is, 

 also, a constitutional difference in liability to the action of 

 the sun between those parts of the skin clothed with white 

 hair and other parts." Whether the saving of the skin from 

 being thus burned is of sufficient importance to account for 

 a dark tint having been gradually acquired by man through 

 natural selection, I am unable to jadge. If it ,be so, we 

 should have to assume that the natives of tropical America 

 have lived there for a much shorter time than the negroes in 

 Africa, or the Papuans in the southern parts of the Malay 

 Archipelago, just as the lighter-colored Hindus have resided 

 in India for a shorter time than the darker aborigines of the 

 central and southern parts of the peninsula. 



Although with our present knowledge we cannot account 

 for the differences of color in the races of man, through any 



been noticed by some medical officers that Europeans with light hair and florid 

 complexions sufEer less from diseases of tropical countries than persons with 

 dark hair and sallow complexions ; and, so far as I know, there appear to be 

 good grounds for this remark." On the .other hand, Mr. Heddle, of Sierra 

 Leone, "who has had more clerks killed under him than any other man," by 

 the climate of the "West African Coast (W. Eeade, "African Sketch Book," 

 vol. ii. p. 522), holds a directly opposite view, as does Capt. Burton. 



'• "Man a Special Creation," 1873, p. 119. 



" "Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication," vol. ii. pp, 

 836, 331. 



