(Footnote.  It is allowed by travellers that the Patagonians have tufts of hair on the upper lip and chin.  Captain Carver says that among the tribes he visited the people made a regular practice of eradicating their beards with pincers.  At Brussels is preserved, along with a variety of ancient and curious suits of armour, that of Montezuma, king of Mexico, of which the visor, or mask for the face, has remarkably large whiskers; an ornament which those Americans could not have imitated unless nature had presented them with the model.  See a paper in the Philosophical Transactions for 1786, which puts this matter beyond a doubt.  In a French dictionary of the Huron language, published in 1632, I observe a term corresponding to “arracher la barbe.”)

Their complexion is properly yellow, wanting the red tinge that constitutes a tawny or copper colour.  They are in general lighter than the Mestees, or halfbreed, of the rest of India; those of the superior class who are not exposed to the rays of the sun, and particularly their women of rank, approaching to a great degree of fairness.  Did beauty consist in this one quality some of them would surpass our brunettes in Europe.  The major part of the females are ugly, and many of them even to disgust, yet there are those among them whose appearance is strikingly beautiful; whatever composition of person, features, and complexion that sentiment may be the result of.

COLOUR NOT ASCRIBABLE TO CLIMATE.

The fairness of the Sumatrans comparatively with other Indians, situated as they are under a perpendicular sun where no season of the year affords an alternative of cold, is I think an irrefragable proof that the difference of colour in the various inhabitants of the earth is not the immediate effect of climate.  The children of Europeans born in this island are as fair as those born in the country of their parents.  I have observed the same of the second generation, where a mixture with the people of the country has been avoided.  On the other hand the offspring and all the descendants of the Guinea and other African slaves imported there continue in the last instance as perfectly black as in the original stock.  I do not mean to enter into the merits of the question which naturally connects with these observations; but shall only remark that the sallow and adust countenances so commonly acquired by Europeans who have long resided in hot climates are more ascribable to the effect of bilious distempers, which almost all are subject to in a greater or less degree, than of their exposure to the influence of the weather, which few but seafaring people are liable to, and of which the impression is seldom permanent.  From this circumstance I have been led to conjecture that the general disparity of complexions in different nations might POSSIBLY be owing to the more or less copious secretion or redundance of that juice, rendering the skin more or less dark according to the qualities of the bile