58 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 93 



of these complex agencies, in other words, might act as a contributory, 

 exciting, modifying, or cliecking cause of the abnormahties under 

 consideration. 



CLIMATE 



The cHmate of England has been blamed. Law (1909, p. ']'/) 

 thought ear exostoses were " more frequent in the South, and more 

 so among individuals who have lived in hot climates." Alexander 

 ( 1930) regards climate as possibly influential in " releasing " the 

 growths. Moller-Holst (1932, p. 69) says — though apparently not 

 as a result of personal observation — that " it is also an interesting 

 fact that the development of exostoses in the external auditory canal 

 occurs more frequently in people who had had a prolonged stay in 

 the tropics "; yet on another page (102) he states that this view is 

 " unfounded ". 



Remarks. — Our materials hardly sustain the claim for climate as 

 one of the causes of ear exostoses. Our northernmost large group, the 

 Eskimo, is nearly free from the growths ; but so is one of the most 

 southern groups, the Egyptians, and so are even more, apparently, 

 the essentially hot-climate African Negroes. The exostoses are fre- 

 quent along the coasts in Peru, but so they are in the highlands of 

 Peru and Bolivia. The old tribes of the Channel Islands in California 

 and those of Florida, who were equally at least as " oceanic " ur litoral 

 as the Peruvians, show much less incidence of these formations. 

 This is particularly noteworthy in Florida, whose old natives belonged 

 largely to the same physical type as those of Louisiana and Arkansas, 

 and where moreover there was a prevalent tendency toward a super- 

 abundance of bone formation, as shown frequently by all parts of the 

 skull as well as the skeleton. The greatest involvement by the ex- 

 ostoses is found in tribes of Dakota, Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, 

 and Arkansas — all inland regions but differing considerably in cli- 

 matic conditions. And there is the considerably greater frequency of 

 the growths in the Polynesians than in the Melanesians, with whom 

 the climate is very similar. 



From the above it seems that for the present the only safe con- 

 clusion to be drawn from the geographical distribution of tympanic 

 exostoses is that their frequency differs very considerably in differ- 

 ent territories, but that this is largely, if not entirely regardless of 

 climate or other geographic factors. 



r 

 FOOD, DRINK, HABITS 



Stiiiiulatiiig food and drink. — Toynbee (i860), aside from other 

 considerations, says : " The disease in question may be divided into 



