SLEEPING IT OFF.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 190, 14 August 1933, Page 6

SLEEPING IT OFF.

What to do with an English winter has long been one of the major problems of life in these latitudes (says the "Manchester Guardian ). People with money and leisure run away from it, most of us grin and bear it, while a handful of vociferous enthusiasts assert that it is the source of all our island virtues, since without its rousing call to combat we might grow lax and lethanric. It. now appears from some interesting notes in the "Lancet" that they may have known better what to do with it in some earlier o-lacial period when life was nearly all winter. From the "Lancet" notes it appears that school children undoubtedly grow more rapidly and put on more weight during the autumn months of September, October and November; that aspect of the "growth cycle" has been noted in Scotland, in Scandinavia and in the United States. It has also been noted in Australia, with this difference, that children of the English stock in Melbourne select the autumn mouths of the southern hemisphere (April May and June) for their spurt ahead and show 'a far slower rate of increase in their spring months of October, November and December. This "Weight-activity" of the growing child in autumn shows an obvious correspondence with \the nabits of those hibernating animals which eat vigorously and put on weight as a preparation for their winter slumber. It is true, that in these degenerate days neither the child nor the adult would*be allowed (even if it were ablo) to "sleep off" the effects of winter, but the compiler of the Australian figures for school children suggests that they do sho,w that man still bears within him the remnants of "an energyrhythm from previous glacial or other periods when hibernation, either complote or intermittent, similar to that of the polar bear, was absolutely essential to man's survival through a strenuous winter when food supplies were scanty." In some ways our winter is still more strenuous than many of us would desire —what, a pity we /ever lost the habit of sleeping through it.