altogether denies that Europeans with dark hair withstand a hot climate better than other men: on the contrary, experience has taught him in making a selection of men for service on the coast of Africa, to choose those with red hair. (62. ‘Anthropological Review,’ Jan. 1866, p. xxi. Dr. Sharpe also says, with respect to India (‘Man a Special Creation,’ 1873, p. 118), “that it has been noticed by some medical officers that Europeans with light hair and florid complexions suffer less from diseases of tropical countries than persons with dark hair and sallow complexions; and, so far as I know, there appear to be good grounds for this remark.” On the other hand, Mr. Heddle, of Sierra Leone, “who has had more clerks killed under him than any other man,” by the climate of the West African Coast (W. Reade, ‘African Sketch Book,’ vol. ii. p. 522), holds a directly opposite view, as does Capt. Burton.) As far, therefore, as these slight indications go, there seems no foundation for the hypothesis, that blackness has resulted from the darker and darker individuals having survived better during long exposure to fever-generating miasma. Dr. Sharpe remarks (63. ‘Man a Special Creation,’ 1873, p. 119.), that a tropical sun, which burns and blisters a white skin, does not injure a black one at all; and, as he adds, this is not due to habit in the individual, for children only six or eight months old are often carried about naked, and are not affected. I have been assured by a medical man, that some years ago during each summer, but not during the winter, his hands became marked with light brown patches, like, although larger than freckles, and that these patches were never affected by sun-burning, whilst the white parts of his skin have on several occasions been much inflamed and blistered. With the lower animals there is, also, a constitutional difference in liability to the action of the sun between those parts of the skin clothed with white hair and other parts. (64. ‘Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication,’ vol. ii. pp. 336, 337.) Whether the saving of the skin from being thus burnt is of sufficient importance to account for a dark tint having been gradually acquired by man through natural selection, I am unable to judge. If it be so, we should have to assume that the natives of tropical America have lived there for a much shorter time than the Negroes in Africa, or the Papuans in the southern parts of the Malay archipelago, just as the lighter-coloured Hindoos have resided in India for a shorter time than the darker aborigines of the central and southern parts of the peninsula.