That the colour of the hair in certain races has undergone a considerable change in the course of time is apparent from what is known to have taken place in Britain. The ancient Germans were universally characterized by red hair and blue eyes, and what is termed a strongly marked zanthous constitution; but, Niebuhr says, the Germans are now far from being a light-haired race; and Chevalier Bunsen remarks that he has often looked in vain for the golden or auburn locks and light cærulean eyes of the old Germans among their descendants, but in Scandinavia he found the colour of the hair and eyes precisely those described by Tacitus. From this it is inferred that the altered conditions of life, brought about by civilization, have produced a change in the physical character of the people. Such change, however, is confined within very narrow limits; in the hair it is but a mere shade of colour or variation in its crispness. Under the microscope, the definite form of the human hair is most exact and uniform; so much so, that Mr. Queckett was enabled by this test to confirm the conjectures of the Archæological Society, in a very scientific manner, respecting some portions of skin taken from church doors in Essex, and from Worcester Cathedral. Tradition said, pirates and persons guilty of sacrilege in old time were flayed, and their skins nailed to the church door. Mr. Queckett was to determine if the relics confided to his charge, and which looked exactly like scraps of old parchment, were really portions of the human body. A few hairs were discovered adhering to the skin and this decided the point—it was unmistakeably human hair and human skin—and the Archæologists were made happy by the discovery. Would that we could send the smallest fragment of one of those skins with but a solitary hair upon it—which Hanno hung up in the Temple of Juno—to Mr. Q., with the publishers’ compliments, that he might ascertain the true character of the hairy people the old Carthaginian fell in with on his route.
The colour of the hair is also an indication of temperament: black hair is usually accompanied by a bilious temperament; fair and auburn, with the sanguine and sanguine-nervous; and very light hair, with a temperament mild and lymphatic.
Will any one undertake to say what was the precise colour of the golden hair so vaunted of by the great poets of antiquity? One of our living poets, the author of “The Bride of Rimini,” has brought the light of genius and his fine taste and scholarship to the task, and the matter is yet doubtful. Some have not hesitated to decide that it was red, fiery red, and nothing short of red; and sneered at the ancients for affecting to be connoisseurs in these things. Some have contended that it was auburn, which is a glorious colour, and seems naturally associated with smiles and the rich imagery of poets. In the well-known ode of Anacreon, where he speaks of the beauty of his mistress as a fit subject for the painter’s art, it is difficult to say what colour we must choose. Some prefer to think dark jetty locks were intended, such, possibly, as Byron has given to one of his beauties:
“The glossy darkness of that clustering hair,
Which shades, yet shows a forehead more than fair.”
Ben Jonson—no mean authority—blends with the jetty locks threads of fine gold:
“Gold upon a ground of black.”
If a mere stripling might handle the bow of Ulysses, we would venture to select the colour which Tennyson has bestowed upon a pretty little portrait:
“Her eyes a bashful azure, and her hair
In gloss and hue the chesnut, when the shell