NATURE'S FREAKS

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 05, Issue 78, 15 July 1942, Page 2

NATURE'S FREAKS

DON'T WORRY IF YOU ARE

LEFT-HANDED

Science arrives at normality in humans by striking an average, so it is almost certain that a vast majority of us vary, however slightly, from the "normal." Last year a Queensland surgeon freed the fingers and toes of a seven year old boy, who had been born with webbed hands and feet. Well, you. I, everyone, must pass through a webbed toe and linger stage befbre birth—a queer phase we share with the apes, monkeys and lemurs. We lost our webs, the boy kept his. Una Medina, a Peruvian Indian girl, in 19H8 became a mother at' the (aliegetl) age of four years eight months. Her child, a boy, survives. Sceptical doctors say that X-ray shows her true age as eight when the child was born. That makes her still a marvel and (most of us would add) abnormal. A baby born in Perth (West Australia) began to talk at four months. Those eases represent three typical ways in which Nature may produce a freak. The first was survival of an. aiv, cestral structure that rarely persists after birth. In the same category are the remnants of tails we are all born with and the rudiment called the appendix. Other pre-birth possessions we've all had (and lost) are gills like a lish, a coat of fur, and a third eye. To possess remnants of all these is "normal." About 150 eases of babies born with tails are recorded. They are usually removed surgically and the youngsters grow up none the worse. Every one of us had a pre-birth tail several inches long. There are many other "abnormalities" due to survival of ancestral structures —lop ear pointed ears, fang teeth (over developed canines) movable ears, hairiness, and the 'monkey muscle" (for climbing trees) in the armpit. Look at your eyes in a mirror. The red spot in each inner corner is your rudimentary third eyelid. You'd be quite deaf without your remaining gill, inherited . from your fish ancestry, because instead of closing—like j r our other gills—before you were born, it becomes the Eustachian tube running from throat to middle ear, allowing air to reach the back of the eaj>drum and keep it taut. Lina Medina became physically 0 woman while still mentally a child. Medical science traces such cases to over-activity of glands which govern growth and development. A Sydney boj r grew up at the age fo four. At seven his l'ather.Jiad to •shave him cevry ten days or so. The boy's strength was prodigious. At eight he could carry a heavy bag of cement. His teeth and bones were, at twelve, those of an adult. His face and voice were mature at nine. A Sydney girl became a woman at three. She could not talk, but had the figure of an adult woman. In this case an internal cystic growth caused the forced development. A surgeon removed it and the "woman" became a child again. With the Perth infant the brain alone was developing on a quicker timetable. The cases mentioned are extremes, but slight variations, plus or minus, are so common that Ave may say: "No one is normal." Everyone varies from the average somewhere. Take your pulse-rate. Standard seventy a minute (seventy to sev-enty-five, male adult, woman a little more). Maybe you are over or below, but don't rate yourself "abI normal" if you vary ten either Avay. Beathing-rate when resting should be fourteen to eighteen a minute. But don't get worried if you are below fourteen. That may be due to extra lung capacity. Look at your eyes in a mirror. If you have light brown or green eyes, it's ten to one the colour patterns in each iris are not a match. This can vary to the extent of one blue (or green) eye, one brown. Famous film stars Colleen Moore and Lionel Stander each had one blue, one brow;#. So had the faun ous Melbourne cut, who vised to sidle round the opposite side of a visitor's chair at dinner, posing as another cat, to get extra tit-bits! So don't worry if you're left-hand-ed or double jointed. Nature packs the world with "abnormals," and that adds to the spice of life.