THE MIRACLE OF SUNBURN

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1751, 27 September 1905, Page 73

THE MIRACLE OF SUNBURN

There are certain arctic animals, darkcoated in the short summer, that in winter turn pure white, thus matching, the snow-covered landscape and escaping notice and harm. This change of colour, this protection—effected no one knows how —is wonderful, as wonderful as a miracle; and yet a kindred change of colour, a kindred protection, happens among mankind every summer, and nobody ever notices it. When the pale city people go out in the summer sun at the seashore or the mountains the light attacks them fiercely, first reddening their skin, then swelling, blistering,, and scorching it. If they kept in the sun enough, and if no miracle occurred, the light would kill them finally, burning off the skin first, and afterward attacking the raw flesh. But a miracle does occur. The skin changes from a pale colour to a tan, and on this tan the sun lias no effect. The sun may beat on tan-coloured skin for days and weeks, but such skin remains always sound, unblistered, whole. Thus nature works a miracle. The white skin is suffering, and nature, aware somehow that a tan skin is sunproof, changes to tan the white. How does she do this. Where did she learn that it was wise to do this? No one knows. Only the fact of the miracle remains. _ To prove this miracle—to prove that it is not the hardening of the skin, but the change in its colour, which protects it from sunburn—is an easy matter. Let a pale person, unused to the sun stain one side of his face yellow, and. leaving the other side untouched, go out in the bright summer sun for a couple of hours. The one side of his face is no tougher, no more hardened, than the other, yet the unstained side will be inflamed, blistered, while the tancoloured one will be quite cool and unhurt. Sunburn is a miracle, a protection to mankind, as inexplicable and as wonderful as the miracle of the arotio animals’ change in the winter from dark coats to snow-white ones.