Over a period of several years, I have been troubled by the seemingly irrational feeling that an unusual percentage of my patients with atopic dermatitis had brown eyes. During 2 intervals in the past 10 years, records of eye color in consecutive patients with atopic dermatitis have been kept. These records bear out this impression, almost two-thirds of these persons having brown eyes. A guess by a colleague in ophthalmology that the general population of Iowa averages only 40% brown eyes has likewise been proved true in 2 samples of persons used as controls, and the same 40% proportion of brown-eyed individuals occurred in a continuous sampling of patients with skin disease. Method The study was begun in 1951 and continued for 2 years. At that time a departmental move interrupted the study, and it was temporarily put aside, then resurrected in 1957, and continued to the present time. Because