@High Seas,
Quote:Infrablue - hardly a matter of aesthetics. More a matter of survival, since in all fair-skinned people darkening skin means horrible mutilation or death. Gangrene, it's called, can be caused by infections, frostbite, lots of other diseases. Read "The Snows of Killimanjaro" sometime.
m-hmm. . .
It was Johann Friedrich Blumenbach that first coined the terms for racial classification in his book,
On the Natural Varieties of Mankind (1776): the Caucasian race or white race; the Mongolian or yellow race; the Malayan or brown race; the Negroid, or black race; and the American or red race.
About the Caucasian race he wrote:
Caucasian variety - I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighborhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian; and because all physiological reasons converge to this, that in that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones (birth place) of mankind.
"The Snows of Kilimanjaro," good story. I read it in my copy of
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.