Changelings

"She's a tough land under the corn mister: She has changed the bone in the cheeks of

many races. . . . She's a tough land under the oak-trees

mister : It may be she can change the word in the

book As she changes the bone of a man's head

in his children. . . ."

So sang Poet Archibald MacLeish in his Frescoes For Mr. Rockefeller's City. The sound kernel of truth in Poet MacLeish's observation has been clinically noted by Columbia's Anthropologist Franz Boas. At the New York Academy of Medicine last week Dr. Charles Rupert Stockard, embryologist, morphologist and anatomist at Cornell Medical School, offered a possible explanation:

"Persons from inland Europe are brachycephalic or short-headed, while their children reared in New York and Boston become much more long-headed or dolichocephalic. This reaction may be due to the more favorable physiological action of the thyroid gland in a maritime environment, since the inland Continental regions are so frequently low in surface iodine and thyroid disturbances are prevalent. . . .

"Members of families migrating from Europe to reside in America become some-what modified and in one or two generations, differ from their European, cousins in much greater ways than occur among those members residing in the same country. These differences are probably due to modified reactions of the endocrine glands which act to adapt our internal environments to the changed external conditions of climate and food. Such mechanisms are our means of adaptation in maintaining a normally balanced internal chemistry. Different climatic, meteorological, light and other effects on one's own personal well being and activities may often be noticed by an observant person who has lived in several distantly separated parts of the world. The environment influences the endocrines through food and salt differences and these are the mechanisms by which we modify our functions and behaviors in becoming adapted to the new surroundings."

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