Abstract
COLOUR of skin has always been and still is the most frequently used character in definition of races. The essential reason is that skin colour is considered as an inherited trait for which a hypothetical polygenie mechanism of transmission has been suggested (Davenport, Gates and Stern). It was almost the interracial differences that had caught the eye, but the possibility of using a spectrophotometer1,2 has induced me to explore the inter-individual variability in one population. The essential conclusions of the examination of 143 Belgian male students and 177 female students with an EEL spectrophotometer at nine wave-lengths (430 mµ to 700 mµ) during April 1960 are reported here. Measurements were taken at the forehead and inner arm. Table 1 gives means and standard deviations. More detailed results will be published elsewhere3.
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LEGUEBE, A. Inter-Individual Variability in Pigmentation. Nature 191, 1326–1327 (1961). https://doi.org/10.1038/1911326a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1911326a0
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