WHY YOUR FACE IS DIFFERENT FROM MINE.

Taranaki Daily News, 13 March 1920, Page 10

WHY YOUR FACE IS DIFFERENT FROM MINE.

HOW SCIENCE EXPLAINS IT. Professor Arthur Keith is the most learned of present-day anthropologists. He is also an exponent who has the rare and precious gift of bringing his science down to the level of the street.

He recently initiated the public into the mysteries of the internal secretory glands, the endocrine glands, as thev are called, and explained that these glands are responsible for the wide differences in facial type which distinguish the Negro and the Chinaniaa as compared with the European. If the particular gland which, he indicated as the probable cause of these differences—namely, the pituitary—is the chief agent in producing these'pronounced racial characteristics, it is not unreasonable to suppose that it is equally responsible for the individual differences which any side-walk will reveal to the curious observer, says Dr. Leonard Williams, in the Daily Mail. It is easy to attach labels to men when viewed in the mass. We say, for example, that the Latin is swarthy and the Anglo-Saxon is fair; but. such a generalisation, true though it be. nevertheless furnishes a formula which fails in numberless cases. And when Professor Keith tells us that the European is characterised by "sharp and pronounced nasalisation of the face, the tendency to strong eyebrow ridges, and a prominent chin," we recognise that, as compared with the Mongol, such is undoubtedly the case.

We have not, however, to look very far for exceptions to the rule- Among some almost farcical noncomformists to the facial type of the European there is the person whom someone once described as having "a face like a dog-biscuit."

But it must not be imagined that among these endocrine glands the pituitary is the only possible delineator of facial caricatures. The thyroid, if not a worse, is certainly in these climes a more frequent offender. It can produce a "dog-biscuit" just as easily as the pituitary, and there is hardly one of the glands which might not, on occasion, claim a prize in the open competition. It is thus by a subtle alembic something, distilled from the innermost recesses of these internal secretory glands, [that our faces are made.

It is even so with our figures, and conspicuously so with our characters. It is not for nothing that the wisdom of the ages has claimed to read qualities and dctfeet.i by a study of the outwara seeming.

Upon the exact proportion in which the alchemy distilled from out the»e glands is blended in the blood depend the nature, the tone, the temperament, and disposition of the individual.

An excess of one essence denotes a. deficiency of another. The man of action, with his stature medium to short, with his keen eye, his quick thought and eager word, is the embodiment of one classical admixture in which the suprarenal.l? play a prominent part; while the tall man, though he may look a "devil of a fellow" with bis six feet two and over, will lie found on acquaintances to be languorous, even lazy; r.rtistic or contemplative, certainly not combative. He too represents a recognisable _ compound. But there are types who refuse to conform to a formula. The genius, no less than the idiot, is physically and mentally the resultant, the puppet and pantin of his endocrine glands. If we did but know how to produce a really harmonius mixture, what a race of prodigies we could rear! That may come. In the meantime, all that is open to us is, with Mark Twain, to be particularly cara§jU.ia the choice of our parents.