How Children Grow

Soon as a baby is born, tagged, foot-printed and washed in Cleveland's splendid Maternity Hospital, one of the assistants of Professor Thomas Wingate Todd, Western Reserve University's anthropologically minded anatomist, marches in with calipers and measuring tape. She measures the baby from head to foot-- feet, shins, thighs; hands, forearms, arms; feet to crest of head, rump to top of head; breadth and depth of head. The baby may wriggle and mew but willy-nilly he is one more mannikin in a long, laborious, illuminating research.

When the baby graduates to Cleveland's Babies' & Children's Hospital, while he goes to kindergarten, to grammar school, to high school, Professor Todd intends to take frequent notes on all his measurable parts including shape and set of nose, eyes and ears. Professor Todd and assistants have been doing this to Cleveland children for the past six years.

Just before Charles Francis Brush, Cleveland inventor of arc lights and storage batteries, died in 1929, he gave $500,000 for a Brush Foundation to improve the human race and regulate its population. Dr. Todd, a tall, angular Yorkshireman whose fondest possession is an original photograph of Charles Darwin, took charge of the Brush Foundation. His first goal, and the purpose of his meticulous measurements of Cleveland children, is to find exactly how a human being grows from childhood to adulthood. When he learns what happens to the body (including brain), he expects to find out precisely how the mind and soul mature.

Many of the physical aspects of growth which Dr. Todd has observed are utterly new to scientists. Last week he presented a summary in Science.

Dr. Todd finds that "the adult form of mankind is the outcome of growth enhanced, dwarfed, warped or mutilated by the adventures of life." Heredity is important, and so is environment, especially nutrition. Undernourishment and malnourishment apparently do not affect heights to which children grow. But they very plainly keep children from becoming as broad and deep-chested and as bigheaded as they should be.

"It is a curious and intriguing fact that the face is extraordinarily sensitive to disturbances of growth. The dynamic centres of growth in the face have their maximum activity early in life and, growth being more seriously handicapped at that particular time, they suffer most."

The vestibule of the ear, the organ which controls the body's static balance and is intimately related to sea sickness, is the first organ to become functionally mature--because the fetus needs it for floating safely in the waters of birth. At birth the ear's vestibule is as big as it ever will be.

The smelling area of the nose grows most before the child is six months old. In early childhood the middle part of the nose grows most. In later childhood the lower part of the nose unfolds and grows until about adolescence. The faces of most snub-nosed grown-ups simply froze prematurely. Many of them, when children, just lacked proper food to grow on.

The eyeball becomes as big as it ever will when a child is about four years old. "The practical implication of this [is] that defects of vision, which indicate anomaly of growth, must be corrected far earlier in childhood than is customary today."

The brain acquires its final pattern and shape, although only about four-fifths adult size, between the fourth and sixth years. "In other words, we send our children to school when all their mental faculties are potentially present, awaiting education to transform them into abilities."

The heads of boys and girls grow at the same rate from the nose up. But "it is characteristic of anthropoids and man that bodily growth in the female practically ceases at puberty, whereas, in the male, it continues for several years." Therefore the upper lips and jaws of boys have time to lengthen, while girls more often remain "baby faced."

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