rge allowance for the fashion in
portrait painting of the day, there remains a great difference
between the proportion in which certain casts of features are to be
met with at different dates. I have spent some time in studying the
photographs of the various portraits of English worthies that have
been exhibited at successive loan collections, or which are now in
the National Portrait Gallery, and have traced what appear to be
indisputable signs of one predominant type of face supplanting
another. For instance, the features of the men painted by and about
the time of Holbein have usually high cheekbones, long upper lips,
thin eyebrows, and lank dark hair. It would be impossible, I think,
for the majority of modern Englishmen so to dress themselves and
clip and arrange their hair, as to look like the majority of these
portraits.

Englishmen are now a fair and reddish race, as may be seen from the
Diagram, taken from the Report of the Anthropometric Committee to
the British Association in 1880 and which gives the proportion in
which the various colours of hair are found among our professional
classes.

[Illustration: ]

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