Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/625

Rh Quite independently Dr. Beddoe discovered the same fact in the Rhine cities, basing his conclusions, however, entirely upon adults. Here again, as in the case of the head form, we must reckon with the fact that city populations are always, by reason of intermixture, a mean, intermediate between the extremes presented by the country at large. So in northern blond Hanover the cities should contain more dark traits than the country; in Bavaria, on the contrary, we should expect them, for this same reason, to be somewhat more blond. Nevertheless, this would not account for the dark hair in certain Prussian cities, which contain more than twice as many dark as there are light traits; and in Bavaria, as we have seen, the actual condition is exactly the reverse of what might have been statistically expected.

Austria offers confirmation of the same tendency toward brunetteness in twenty-four out of its thirty-three principal cities. Farther south, in Italy, it was noted much earlier that cities contained fewer blondes than were common in the rural districts roundabout. The rule has been corroborated for the greater part of the country, since Livi finds that even in the thirty-two darkest provinces, where towns tending toward the mean for the country should contain more blondes than the suburban districts, twenty-one of the capital cities show the reverse relation, while only nine conform to statistical probability. For Switzerland alone the evidence is conflicting. Applying the rule to the cities of the British Isles, Dr. Beddoe finds it to hold good especially in the color of the hair. So uniform is the testimony in this direction that those who, like Ammon and Lapouge, have ascribed the long-headedness of city populations to a predominance of the Teutonic racial type, now acknowledge this tendency toward brunetteness in spite, in this case, of ethnic probabilities to the contrary. The relative frequency, in fact, of long-headedness and coincidently of brunette characteristics induced Lapouge to designate this combination the "foreordained urban type." In conclusion, let us add, not as additional testimony, for the data are too defective, that among five hundred American students at the Institute of Technology in