OUR FACE FROM FISH TO MAN 



roids and there must have been a fair sufficiency 

 of iodine in my food, for I missed being a cretin. 

 After birth I never developed any notable defi- 

 ciency in either the hypophysis, the thyroids, the 

 thymus or other glands, so on all these counts I 

 missed obesity, and on account of the fair state of 

 the pituitary I escaped gigantism and acromegaly; 

 as the adrenals functioned properly, excessive pig- 

 ment was not deposited in the skin and so I 

 escaped Addison's disease by a wide margin. 



Thus owing to all the favorable circumstances 

 of my prenatal development I did not "come into 

 the world scarce half made up" but all the various 

 parts of my face joined together in the right order, 

 with no undue accelerations or delays, and so 

 I escaped many distressing inconveniences such as 

 a hare lip or a cleft palate. At the right time 

 before birth I lost the "Mongolian fold" in the 

 inner corner of my eye; nor was my face marked 

 with a naevus. But after birth I had to run the 

 gamut of children's diseases and no doubt they 

 checked growth to some extent, leaving me with 

 a temporarily impaired heart and a little below 

 the average in stature and weight. On the deficit 



side also there was a defective turbinate bone 



228 



