Masks and Faces
Our Face from Fish to Man. By William K. Gregory. (Putnams. 18s.)
EVERYIIIING depends on the countenance, says Cicero : Mile face is the image of the mind. Shakespeare, on the other hand, Bolds it impossible to find the mind's construction in the face. Perhaps Mr. Silas Wegg strikes the hippy mean in stating that all men are wt.gifted alike with a .speaking countenance. Certainly none of these authorities knew so much about physiognomy as the eminent Professor of -Vertebrate PalaeOn- tolOgy at Columbia Universily, who -tells us that " even the most imposing human faces are but made-over fish traps, concealed behind a smiling mask."
Dr. Gregory. now gives.us.a most interesting analysis of our features; and &full and learned deseription of the way in which they were gradually built -up by our- very remote ancestors. It is rather curious to notice that he has to reckon on offending the prejudices of part of his American audience. Ovid was wrong, no doubt; in attiibUtinitO Prometh-us the endowment of man with a -face looking _tip to theskies, but at least he feared no religious persecution ffir holding an even balance between the theories of special creation and, of evolution. But Dr. Gregoryreminds us that ".the very idea of evolution is anathema" in Tennessee, and he. frequently .pauses in his argument to address . a solemn admonition to the " anti- evolutionists," " anti-Darwinians," or (as Dr. William Beebe calls them in 'his foreword) " Fundarnentalists," who seem to be more numerous, or at least more vocal, on the opposite side Of the Atlantic. gilt in this country we have long been satin- fled that evolution may be regarded as not the antithesis but the method of Creation. No one need be deterred by theo- logical bias from accepting Dr. Gregory's proof " that the god- like mask which is the human face is made out of the same elements as in the &milks r and. hat in both' ape and man the bony framework of the face is composed of strictly homologous elements, inherited from a long line of lower vertebrates."
The idealist may sigh-to think that the human faoe originated in greed and hunger. It was developed first of •all by the world-old and unending hunt for food which, in spite of all the advance of civilisation, remains the primary condition of existence. The earliest and simplest forms- of life, hovering between the animal and vegetable kingdoms, and 'anchored or floating in the warm seas which covered the whole surface of the earth perhaps a thousand million years ago, had no faces, because they were " all face." They absorbed their food through any part of their organism that happened to come into contact with it. The earliest true face consisted of a mouth only, as in the Slipper Animalcule, " a gash in the side of its moccasin-like body." The geological record is too imperfect to let us trace the steps by which the earliest verte- brates came into being, but when the fossils reveal them as free-swimming predatory creatures, little more than two hundred million years ago, they had already discovered the use of a face in the struggle for existence. We must remember that the primitive face is " merely the food-detecting and food-trapping mask in front of the brain." Dr. Gregory justifies his title by finding the prototype of the human coun- tenance in the shark, who " shows us our own facial anatomy . . . . reduced to simplest terms." The os sublime is due to the arboreal habits of our less remote ancestors, and especially to the gibbon's practice of climbing in an erect posture, so that it was desirable to be able to look up.
Although the mouth is the oldest and most essential facial element, it is not the one of which we are proudest. Dr, Gregory works out in detail the origin of the love-darting eyes, vermeil-tinctured lips, shell-like ears and tip-tilted noses which poets ignorant of palaeontology have celebrated. He allows himself to speculate on the faces of a million years hence, with their fewer teeth, weaker jaws and larger brain- cases. But even he can throw no light on what he justly calls the ultimate mystery of evolution. We know what kind of changes took place, but we do not know–zperhips we!never shall know—what forces acting on the primitive skin caused one set of epithelial cells to become sensitive to light, another set to differentiate smells, another to respond to sound' waves. We do not even know why our eyes are sensitive only to that infinitesimal range of electric waves which we call light. We might just as reasonably possess a sense-organ that •would let us listen to all broadcasting without valve or crystal. Let us trust that only a small minority would hire a surgeon to extirpate it.
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