ADENOID FACE

Greymouth Evening Star, 7 May 1931, Page 10

ADENOID FACE

) CIVILISATIONI’S MARK. Modern civilisation is a great adventure. We are trying new ways of living, new ways of governing, and new ways pt doing business, writes Sir Arthur Keith in the “Daily Mail.” What is to be the effect oh! English people of massing them in cities, sheltering therii in offices and factories, giving them foods, drinks, and medicines which their ancestors knew nothing of? The industrial revolution is not yet three centuries old. What effect is it having on us? Are we growing taller, biggei* brained, and bettei - looking? Or- are the- changes of an opposite kind? There is orie thing we can be certain of: we are certainly not standing still. Let us suppose we are -watching the great army of men and women which debouches to the City of London each morning. This army is clothed iri the uniform of 1931. Let us supposfe farther that our trains bring their loads of huffidnity, not from neighbouring eorinties, but froth heigllbottring centuries —our earliest loads ebmiiig from the sixteenth century wTieri Elizabeth was Queeiri. ,

As this great procession of English people, emerging as gferit detachments front past ail idfrffied alike, passes before tis, sh&Il -frfe see no change frotn first to lasi? Will the people of 1931 be fexafei couriterparts of the Elizabethans?

The answer is most definite add certain ; we Shall note Certdin charigCS in the people of the fiigfitefififb ceffitury becoming more and tiiote marked as those of the present cdfrttfry file' past us. These changes afffict only fi proportion of the paSsers-by, and concern their facial features. In the eighteenth century a new type of f-ach began to appear in England—the type of countenance -known to ffiedicfii men as the “Adenoid Face.”

To-day about one person out of every five who enters tile City of London of a morning has this type of face developed to a greater or lesser degree; our Elizabethans were almost free from it, narrow, the palate contracted and too small to accommodate the ; teeth, the nose becomes pinched, and the cheek bones sunken,, with the total result that the face' tends to become long and narrow.

Not unpleasant faces to be sure, yet new in type. There is no harm in them; winners of the Victoria Cross and successful cross-country runners may have the adenoid countenance. z It is because our archaeologists have become fifgfily expert in dating aiicient graves that anatomists are now making progress in detecting the changes which are overtaking our bodies. ■

We now know the kinds of people who lived in England in the pa&£, thfi b.eople of the early iron age of Rbffififi period, the Saxons, Angles, Danes, aiffi Normans. It is not until we' cbffie down to the burial places of the eighteenth century that we come abfbSS the changes in facial features just described. Their occurrence becomes much more frequent in our cemeteries of the nineteenth century.

Race is concerned; what may be called the North Sea stock —the Nordic type of man—is the one most involved. The change is giving a proportion of Englishmen a distinctive countenance. Continental caricaturists do not see John Bull as Mr Punch portrays him; they represent the modern Englishman with a long, gaunt face, collapsed jaws, projecting teeth, loose-mouthed, and with pinched, prominent nose.

Unconsciously they have seized, not on. our commonest typo of face —but on our most peculiar the adenoid face.