Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/175

Rh to southwest, measured by the prevailing color of the hair. The map is almost the exact counterpart of our preceding one of place names. From our previous articles we might have been led to expect such an increase from north to south; for that is the rule in every continental country we have studied. The phenomenon we found to be largely a matter of race; but that physical environment, notably climate, played an important part. Moreover, we proved that in elevated districts some factor conduced to increase the blondness, so that mountains more often contained a fairer population than the plains roundabout. Here is a surprising contradiction of that law, if law it be; for the Grampian Hills in Scotland, wild and mountainous Wales, and the hills of Connemara and Kerry in western Ireland, contain the heaviest contingent of brunette traits in the islands. The gradation from east to west is in itself a flat denial of any



climatic influence, for the only change in that direction is in the relative humidity induced by the Gulf Stream.

The darkest part of the populations of these islands constitutes the northern outpost of that degree of pigmentation in Europe. Western Ireland, Cornwall, and Argyleshire in Scotland are about as dark, roughly speaking, as a strip across Europe a little farther