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Show eama m f WHY WE BEHAVE 1 LIKE HUMAN BEINGS Br CEORCE DORSEY, Ph. D, IX. D. 11. ...tt Smiling a Human Trait MOST of na have about 310 muscles on each side of our body. They are subject to such variation that Tes-tut, Tes-tut, a noted French anatomist, required re-quired UttO pagea to describe them. One-fourth of all our muscles are in our -neck and face. The human face can light up or cloud over because Its muscles are attuned for complex actionkeyed ac-tionkeyed to the human pitch. Facial muscles In mammals below man are more simple. We look for Intelligence In the eyes of a borae, not In the expression of its face. When tt needs to flick a fly from Its face or shoulder, It moves a muscle burled In the skin. Such a muscle covers many animals like a blanket We all have bits of this skin musclesome mus-clesome of us more, some less, even on the chest and buck. Usually we cannot can-not twitch It; we send a band after the fly. We have traces of It In our scalp; a few have enough to move the whole scalp. Most of us can wrinkle wrin-kle our forehead and do, when perplexed. per-plexed. Apes use this muscle both In pleasure and to frighten enemies. We all have vestiges of the muscles dogs use to pull, push, and lift their ears; some can even wriggle them. So, while the skin muscle of our face and shoulders tends to dtsappeur, the deeper facial muscles show progressive pro-gressive variation. They are among our most recent acquisitions. We retain re-tain the muscle by which the dog shows Its canine toc'h; we can all suorl. But the muscle by which we smile Is not so regularly present; the man of gloom may have no rlsorlus. Variations In muscles ebont' the nose and moutb, necessary for speech, are usually forward-looking; they give the "speaking likeness" to man. Oft- eu they reveal what the mind Is trying to hide. Only as we grow In experience experi-ence can we make our face a mask to belle our emotions. This Is because the face la primarily under the control of the autonomic nerves; they act of their own sweet will and are by nature na-ture honest. But by and by our brain learns to get control of them; we force our face to wear a smile when onr heart would bid our eyes to weep. Our arms are free; they have not forgotten that they were once legs. Of 36 bodies examined, 202 variations were found In the arm muscles; 119 In the leg. Our Immediate ancestors were four-handed, we are two-footed. But when baby gets on the floor, It polls with Us fore and pushes with Its bind limbs; Just as we once crawled up out of wster on to dry land. ' Palmists rarely read the pad at the outer edge of onr palm or know that we have one like It on the sole of our foot; both protect deep-lying muscles from Injury In walking. The palm pnd has Its own palmar muscle In one man out of every ten. It helped to work the pads which - protected the muscles and tendons beneath. Today, It is as atavistic as the pad Itself; we gave up walking on our hands about 2,000,000 years ago. As for "lines" of fate and marriage, and the "girdle of Venus," they can all be "read" In the hands and feet of monkeys, and to a certain extent In a baby's foot, or In the fetal hands and feet Palmistry Is as dead as phrenology. Anyone who can read "character" or "mental capacity" ca-pacity" from head bumps or ' palm lines Is a wizard. Whut does It all mean, this astounding astound-ing range of variation, on which I have barely touched ? There they are, by the thousands, by unnumbered thousands. Shall we say that they lie, that our levator coccygls never lifted a tall, that our curvator coccygls nev. er curved one, and that our attollens aurlculom never lifted an ear? Or shall we say that we are walking museums mu-seums of comparative anatomy and try to find out whence we came and whither we are going? This Is certain cer-tain : there is no fixed, standardized, perfect or biologically Ideal human body there are no two human bodies quite alike. Kach one of us reeks with evidence that our ancestors were not the two-hnndod. two-footed creatures crea-tures ve are now; that they had no talking mtiRcles; that they could not back up their tnlk with a speaking countenance; and that they could not balance their heads on their spines. Some variations are atavistic or vestigial. Like the buttons on our coat cuffs, they no longer function; like pnrlor boarders, they often make trou-. trou-. hie. They are hangovers from a remote re-mote pnst. They are prone to dls. ease; we should be better off without them. Some are retrogressive, weak sisters of our body, functioning In a half hearted way: we could do without with-out them many of ns do. Some are progressive, a little hit more than human hu-man ; they point to further change In man's physical structure. Taken together, they bridge, every gap and make a complete story, j They prove that, while our eyes look forward, for-ward, our body has not forgotten Its humble origin and carries some dead wood we were well rid of such as appendix, ap-pendix, tall, snarling muscle. Our proneness to hernia and prolapse of the uterus is only one of the many proofs that our body Is not yet perfectly per-fectly adapted to an upright gait ( by Oeorm A. Domy.l 1 |
