Ebbing Tide?

Clarence Alonzo Mills, M. D., professor of experimental medicine at the University of Cincinnati, is ruddy, blue-eyed, vigorous, healthy-looking. He has a theory about health and vigor, and he harps on it so much that to owl-eyed colleagues he seems obsessed. For years Dr. Mills has declaimed that climate has a considerable effect on human growth, stature, sex development, disease resistance.

It is, he believes, a matter of the ease or difficulty with which body heat is disposed of. In cold, dry climates the disposal is easy. This stimulates people, tends to make them grow faster, to protect them against infections. In the Dark Ages, when the Temperate Zone's climate was much warmer than now, wine grapes grew in England, cereals in Iceland, men were poor specimens--short, sluggish, easy victims of plague.

Almost everyone knows that U. S. college freshmen have grown taller and heavier for a long time. The increase goes back 80 or 90 years, shows an inch of stature gain for each of four generations. Girls have grown longer-legged, bigger-waisted, smaller-hipped. They also have reached puberty earlier, a sign of faster growth.

All this physical precocity has been widely attributed to better nutrition. Dr. Mills attributes it to a delayed effect of cold weather in the 18th and igth Centuries.

But since 1929, while people have grown bigger, world weather has grown warmer.

So Mills, believing in the delayed effect, has looked for signs of an ebbing tide in human growth. In Science last week he declared that the signs were definitely in sight. Records of height and weight for 65,000 university freshmen were either trending downward, or wobbling. At three universities the freshman girls have been reporting later and later first menstruations--a phenomenon which Dr. Mills associates with short stature and warm climate. In short, if world weather keeps warmer, Dr. Mills expects a shorter, sicker, slower population.

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