Taking the ocean's temp.

SIR,-We refer to the article by Dr. I. K. Crombie (1981) on the distribution of malignant melanoma on the body surface. Unfortunately, the author's calculations of the proportional distribution by site of total body melanocytes may be erroneous. In his Table III, the proportions of body surface area at different sites appear to have been transposed, such that the surface area of the upper limb is given as almost twice that of the lower limb. The reference quoted (Boyd, 1935) was unavailable to us, but the distributions of body surface area given in other studies (Elwood & Lee, 1975; Briele & Das Gupta 1979) suggest that this table should read as follows: