ENVIRONMENT.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 224, 21 September 1929, Page 16 (Supplement)

ENVIRONMENT.

OLD THEORY REFUTED. BIOLOGISTS NOTE VARIATIONS SIMIANS IN COSTA RICA JUNGLE. Variation is a primary factor of life and is not necessarily dependent upon environment, Dr. Adolpli Scliultz, • of Jolms Hopkins University declared upon his return from the jungles along the Costa Hiqan border, where for three weeks he and Dr. George B. Wislocki, also of Johns Hopkins, lived among, ate and dissected monkeys. "We have been accustomed," said Dr. Scliultz, "to thinking of environment as causing the differences in human physique, but our monkey studies seem to indicate otherwise. For example, we found a tribe of perhaps lifty titi monkeys which lived in the same trees, ate tho same food and took the same exercise, and whose ancestors have been in the same place probably 1000 centuries, to have the same physical variations as any group of United States citizens whose ancestors probably came from the four corners of the earth."

Tli© scientists were surprised at tlie diseases which tlicy found infecting monkeys. The experiments made 011 this trip, Dr. Schultz said, were much the same as were made on a similar one into the interior of Nicaragua eight years ago.