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Features
5
various colours of hair are found among our professional classes.
I take the professional classes because they correspond with the class
of English worthies better than any of the others from which returns have
been collected. The Diagram, however, gives a fair representation of other
classes of the community. For instance, I have analysed the official
records of the very carefully-selected crews of H. M. S. Alert and
Discovery in the Arctic Expedition of 1875-6, and find the proportion of
various shades of hair to be the same among them as is shown in the
Diagram. Seven-tenths of the crews had complexions described as light,
fair, fresh, ruddy or freckled, and the same proportion had blue or gray
eyes. They would have contrasted strongly with Cromwell’s regiment of
Ironsides, who were recruited from the dark-haired men of the fen
districts, and who are said to have left the impression on contemporary
observers as being men of a peculiar breed. They would also probably
have contrasted with any body of thoroughgoing Puritan soldiers taken at
haphazard; for there is a prevalence of dark hair among men of atrabilious
and sour temperament.
If we may believe caricaturists, the fleshiness and obesity of many
English men and women in the earlier years of this century must have
been prodigious. It testifies to the grosser conditions of life in those days,
and makes it improbable that the types best adapted to prevail then would
be the best adapted to prevail now.
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