America are
naturally beardless, I should think that the common opinion on that
subject had been rashly adopted, and that their appearing thus at a
mature age was only the consequence of an early practice, similar to that
observed among the Sumatrans. Even now I must confess that it would
remove some small degree of doubt from my mind could it be ascertained
that no such custom prevails.*

(*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