Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/310

296 mankind. Professor Broca, in his scale of colors of eyes, arranges shades of orange, green, blue, and violet-gray. But one has only to look closely into any eye to see the impossibility of recording its complex pattern of colors; indeed, what is done is to observe it from a distance, so that its tints blend into one uniform hue. It need hardly be said that what are popularly called black eyes are far from having the iris really black like the pupil; eyes described as black are commonly of the deepest shades of brown or violet. These so-called black eyes are by far the most numerous in the world, belonging not only to brown-black, brown, and yellow races, but even prevailing among the darker varieties of the white race, such as Greeks and Spaniards. In races with the darker skin and black hair, the darkest eyes generally prevail, while a fair complexion is usually accompanied by the lighter tints of iris, especially blue.

From ancient times, the color and form of the hair have been noticed as distinctive marks of race. Thus Strabo mentions the Ethiopians as black men with woolly hair, and Tacitus describes the German warriors of his day with their fierce blue eyes and tawny hair. As to color of hair, the most usual is black, or shades so dark as to be taken for black, which belongs not only to the dark-skinned Africans and Americans, but to the yellow Chinese and the dark whites, such as Hindoos or Jews. In the fair-white peoples of Northern Europe, on the contrary, flaxen or chestnut hair prevails. Thus we see that there is a connection between fair hair and fair skin, and dark hair and dark skin. But it is impossible to lay down a rule for intermediate tints, for the red-brown or auburn hair common in fair-skinned peoples occurs among darker races, and dark-brown hair has a still wider range. Our own extremely mixed nation shows every

 (after Primer), a, Japanese; b, German; c, African negro; d, Papuan.

variety, from flaxen and golden to raven black. As to the form of the hair, its well-known differences may be seen in the female portraits in Fig. 5, where the Africans on the left show the woolly or frizzy kind, where the hair naturally curls into little corkscrew spirals, while the Asiatic and American heads on the right have straight hair like a horse's mane. Between these extreme kinds are the flowing or wavy hair, and the curly hair which winds in large spirals; the English hair in the figure is rather of the latter variety. If cross-sections of single hairs are examined under the microscope, their differences of form are seen as in four of the sections by Pruner-Bey (Fig. 7). The almost