DARK AGE COMING

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21910, 20 September 1934, Page 19

DARK AGE COMING

SKINS OF AUSTRALIANS MEDICAL MAN'S PREDICTION [from our own correspondent] SYDNEY. Sept. 13 Gentlemen, it is said, prefer blondes —and particularly may this be true of Australians centuries hence, after sunshine has changed us to a brown-eved. dark-skinned rncp If the theory of the Chief Medical Officer of the Department of Health in New South Wales. Dr. E. Sydney Morris. is correct., blue-eved blondes in Australia will then be as rare and as precious as pearls During the war. he said, numbers of Australian soldiers were burned so deeply by the sun that it was often difficult to decide at first glance whether they were not natives in Australian uniform, as natives often wore discarded uniforms.

Dr. Morris said that such sun-darken-ing would oersist for years, and would probably never be wholly eradicated. He said he bad become very brown while serving in the East, and the upper part of his chest was still darker than the rest of his body. In Syria. Dr. Morris had occasion to visit a village in which malaria was rain pant, and the entire population of 200 turned out to greet him. Among the natives was a woman, as dark as the rest —but with a pair of the most startling blue eyes! "Occasionallv among Kasteru tribes you will find a pair of blue eyes." said br. Morris, "the result centuries afterwards of some union during the time ot the Crusades. There were probably many more pairs of native blue eyes in the early days, but the tendency, as the race becomes darker, is for brown eyes to become prevalent. "The Australian 'browns' where the Englishman burns," said Dr. Morris, "because Nature provides races subjected to strong sunlight with the necessary preserving pigment in the skin. The negro is black for the same reason. The prevalence of blonde types in northern latitudes indicates the trend of racial colour," ho added. "I fully believe that in time we shall be a dark-kinned race, probably as olive in colour as Italians."