A CASE OF ABNORMAL REVERSION.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1157, 27 March 1884, Page 3

A CASE OF ABNORMAL REVERSION.

Not absolutely bound to limit ourselves to one class of subjects in our Review, we are tempted to take what may not improperly be called a retrospective vievi of the attire in which our wives, sisters, and daughters are now promenading the streets. For some unfathomable reason, they seem quite unable to keep things in the golden mean—too much bonnet or too little, too tight or too circumambient gowns ; and for what reason have they now taken to carry behind an apparatus like the hump of a camel or the shelf ot a larder ? Deeply pondering this new development, it has occurred to us that it is distinctly a case of what evolutionists call reversion. They say that the delight we take in a picnic is just from its being a temporary return to the mode in which our forefathers habitually lived; so, with equal reason and with equal truth, we affirm that the present delight of women in an abnormal development of their retrospect is undoubtedly because it is a return to an aesthetic taste which their mothers entertained hundreds of years ago, and which still lives among savage races. Will they just read this passage from Darwin ?— <f It is well known that with many Hottentot women the posterior part of the body projects in a wonderful manner ; they are steatopygous ; and Sir Andrew Smith is certain

that this peculiarity is greatly admired by meu. He once saw a woman who was considered a beauty, and she was so immensely developed behind that when seated on a level ground she could not rise, and had to push herself along until she came to a slope. Some of the women in various negro tribes are similarly characterised ; and, according to Burton, the Somal men are said to chose their wives by ranging them in a line end picking her out who projecets furthest atergod' Precisely so ; and the ladies of this civilised age are (not with the lona tide article but with clothes) Also “ steatopgyous,” and are running a race with each other who " will project furthest a tergo.” Distinct case of reversion ; new proof and illustration of the doctrine of evolution. We call attention to this not as leaders of fashion, but in the interests of scientific enquiry ; holding, further that a theologian is nothing unless he he also a student of human nature. What an ebbing and flowing there is in human progress! How the savage and the heathen ever and anon make an inroad on our Christian civilisation !—N.Z. Presbyterian.