24 
green or turn purple, according to the variety. In all parts of 
Guatemala these two colors seem to be about equally common. 
Besides the common green and purple, variations of these two 
colors are often seen. A light yellowish green is not rare, and a 
bright maroon-purple is sometimes encountered. Very rarely a va- 
riety is crimson-maroon, and very rarely also one is of such deep 
purple as to suggest black. 
Seedlings grown in California from a tree producing green-colored 
fruits have in some instances produced green, in others purple fruits. 
It appears, therefore, that the color of a variety is not necessarily 
the same as that of its parent. 
Skin. — TVTiile its thickness may vary from a sixteenth to a quarter 
of an inch, the skin of all Guatemalan avocados is coarsely granular 
in texture, becoming hard and brittle when it is removed from the 
fruit and dried. It is always sharply differentiated from the flesh. 
If the fruit is at the proper stage of ripeness, the skin can usually 
be peeled from it as from a banana ; in some varieties the skin is so 
thick, however, that it is not sufficiently pliable to peel. In most 
cases the skin peels readily if the fruit is fully ripe but still firm, 
with the flesh the consistency of soft cheese. 
Commonly the skin of Guatemalan avocados is about one-eighth 
of an inch thick. It is often thicker toward the apical end of the 
fruit than toward the base, but in some varieties the reverse is the 
case, and in others it is of about the same thickness throughout. The 
thickest skin seen was that of an avocado from Santa Cruz, Alta 
Vera Paz. This skin measured slightly more than a quarter of an 
inch in thickness. Many of the Vera Paz avocados have thick skins, 
and as these skins are very brittle and can not easily be cut with a' 
knife the common practice is to open an avocado by breaking it in 
half. When an attempt is made to cut such fruits, the hard woody 
shell breaks indiscriminately, and a smooth cut can not be made. 
The thickest skins are not found at the highest altitudes, as has 
sometimes been thought. Thickness of skin seems to be in no way 
correlated with elevation. At 7,500 feet there is the same range in 
thickness as at 4.000 or 5,000 feet. The thickest skin seen in Guate- 
mala was at an elevation of 4,500 feet. 
Xo sharp distinction can be drawn between the thickest skinned 
and the thinnest skinned varieties of the Guatemalan race. Each is 
the extreme of variation in this particular character, and there are 
all intermediate stages between the two. There are no other char- 
acters which differentiate the thick skinned and the thin skinned; 
hence, they must both be considered nothing more than variations of 
the same race. A classification attempting to consider them as dis- 
tinct groups is purely artificial. 
