Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/786

764 By reason of the difficulties above mentioned, our map is intended to convey an idea of the relative brunetteness of the various parts of Europe by means of the shading rather than by concrete percentages. It is, in fact, impossible to reduce all the results to a common base for exact comparison. What we have done is to patch together the maps for each country, adopting a scheme of tinting for each which shall represent, as nearly as may be, its relation to the rest. In the scale at the left the shades on the same horizontal line are supposed to represent approximately equal degrees of pigmentation. The arrangement of the colors in separate groups, it will be observed, corresponds to national systems of measurement. Thus the five tints used in Germanic countries and the six in Italy are separately grouped, and are each distinct from those used for the coloration of France. It will be observed that these separate national groups often overlap at each end. This arrangement indicates, for example, that the darkest part of Scandinavia contains about as many brunette traits as the lightest portion of Germany, and that they are both lighter than any part of Scotland; or that the fourth zone of brunetteness in Germany contains about as high a proportion of dark traits as the lightest part of France, and that they are both about as dark areas as the middle zone in England. As the diagram shows, central France is characterized by a grade of brunetteness somewhat intermediate between the south of Austria and northern Italy. In other words, the increase of pigmentation toward the south is somewhat more gradual there than in the eastern Alps. To summarize the whole system, equally dark tints along the same horizontal line in the diagram indicate that in the areas