Abstract
AT a meeting of the Royal Anthropological Institute held on June 15, Prof. Arthur Keith, ex-president, in the chair, Prof. F. G. Parsons read a paper on “The Colour Index of the British Isles.” He first reviewed the different ways of constructing an index of nigrescence, and directed attention to what he considered their weak points. Prof. Parsons proposed as a simple and workable index that the percentage in any group of individuals with dark brown and black hair should be added to the percentage with eyes in which any brown pigment is present, and the result divided by two. For practical purposes he found it better to record the percentages of dark hair and dark eyes separately. He then proceeded to examine the large mass of statistics collected by Dr. Beddoe in the middle of the last century, and pointed out that the first deduction was that women are in the mass darker than men, and that where the people are, fairest the difference between the sexes is greatest, as the following table shows:
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Colour Index of the British Isles. Nature 105, 531–532 (1920). https://doi.org/10.1038/105531b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/105531b0