PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

684 for the mines must make use of physicists, physiologists, and engineers as well as doctors, to reduce dust, improve bad lighting, and restrict causes of accident to the unforeseen. All new miners should be examined on entry, and those working on the face should be examined at intervals, to ensure that only those fit for this work are employed on it, and that those who show early signs of pulmonary disease are removed from it. .Commenting on an article3 on the care of the aged by Mr. Seebohm Rowntree, the editor of Industrial Welfare notes that the capacity for work and ability to learn has been shown to be much higher among the ageing than is usually assumed, and that their speed of work, reliability, and absence-rates compare very favourably with those of younger workers. Once physical power has declined they can hardly be used in heavy industries, of course, but he suggests that in the lighter tradesas the textile industry has proved-our labour force could be much augmented by allowing older men and women to continue in full or part time work. PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY IN the last decade or two the science of physical anthropology has enlarged its horizon, multiplied many times the number of its unofficial devotees, and transcended its name. The metamorphosis is largely due to these unofficial professionals, for there are only a handful of self-styled physical anthropologists, and in any case advances have mostly come from fields outside the old science. The development of the blood-group investigations was perhaps the beginning. With it came the promise of ever-increasing data on human genetics, and of a clarification of the old muddled problems of race classification and race origins. In America in the 1930’s ambitious studies of child growth began ; anthropometry has gradually become dynamic. Physiologists of all sorts, but especially those concerned with endocrinology and those interested in man’s adaptation to artificial environments, began to contribute. Psychologists like William Sheldon in America and Cyril Burt in England revivified and extended the constitutional studies of the old Italian school of clinical anthropologists ; their findings seemed, too, to hold the germ of yet more interesting investigations on the psychological correlates of physique and physiological function. Meanwhile, in the more familiar territory of palaeoanthropology and comparative anatomy, material has been accumulating faster than ever before. All this activity is well reported in a new American Year Book of Physical Anthropology, whose first number has belatedly come to hand. The year covered is 1945, and the book is a paper-bound collection of reprints of twentysix articles. A particular effort has been made to gather contributions from journals off the anthropologist’s beaten track, and none from the America7a Journal of Physical Anthropology is included. All, however, are in English, and we may hope that in future years French, Swiss, Scandinavian, South American, and Russian work will find a place. Nevertheless, most of the new-and old-interests of physical anthropologists are well represented, though there is little on growth or physique and

nothing A

on

human

physiology.

long article comes from Franz Weidenreich on fossil man in

a welcome tabulation of all hominid fossils discovered there up to 1941. W. E. Le Gros Clark contributes two further papers on palseoanthropology. Adolph Schultz and William Strauss jun. are represented by a contribution on the number of vertebral in the primates, which will long remain the most informative account of this subject; it gives a classification of primates and a considerable bibliography. Papers on functional anatomy are particularly plentiful, and include two by H. Haxton on joint structure and movement, one on the structure of the external nose, and another on variations in the form of the vertebral border of the scapula. No fewer

Java, with

3.

Ibid, p. 46.

than five

articles are devoted to some aspect of tooth formation

evolution ; but there

is only one on human genetics-by Snyder and F. Blank on the inheritance of the shape of the sella turcica. Finally, an entire chapter of Alexander Wiener’s Blood Groups and Transfusion is reprinted, with or

L. H.

tables of racial distribution of the ABO and MN characters complete to 1943. It comes as something of a shock to find in this chapter only a few paragraphs on the Rh groups-so quickly has the subject developed-but a table of these up to 1945 is included in a further article by the same author.

This yearbook in short contains much information of interest to those who are not primarily anthropologists. as well as a useful conspectus for those who are. VENEREAL DISEASE IN BRITISH WEST AFRICA

SMALLPOX,

dysentery, cerebrospinal fever, plague,

typhus, rabies, leprosy, yellow fever, malaria, blackwater fever, trypanosomiasis, bilharziasis, filariasis, infestations with intestinal worms, yaws, and dietary deficiencies are but a few of the special problems confronting the medical authorities responsible for the West African colonies, and somewhere in this long list have to be fitted tuberculosis and venereal diseases. The Colonial Medical Service is hopelessly understaffed for the job-in Nigeria, for example, there is only one

doctor per 130,000 of population. No-one who served with the Forces in that area can have failed to be impressed by the high incidence of venereal disease among the African troops, and, though the task of obtaining a substantial improvement may appear impossible, the problem is multiplying as long as nothing energetic is done. Judged by the published medical statistics of the four colonies the venereal disease situation would not appear to be so bad as for some of the other diseases listed. The annual medical report for 1943 shows that in the Gambia, for example, 1555 patients were treated in the hospitals and dispensaries for venereal disorders-a ratio of 7-77 per thousand of the population of 200,000. However, in the African troops stationed there in 1944, when the majority of sufferers were seen by a doctor,’ the ratio In Sierra Leone, with a populawas 120 per thousand. tion of 1,770,000, in 1943 some 3880 of such patients were treated in the civil hospitals,1 or 2-19 per thousand of the population, but in the Army the ratio in 1944 In the Gold Coast was as high as 279 per thousand. the annual report for 1943 reveals an even wider difference-11,903 civilian patients of the 3,790,000 population were treated, or 3-14 per thousand, while the Army figures reached the staggering total of 500 per Of the 201/2 million in thousand or 50% per annum. Nigeria, only 44,625 patients are reported as treated by the civilian authorities in 1943, a ratio of 2.17 per thousand. Comparable Army figures for 1944 are not available, but the estimated incidence of gonorrhoea. alone in West African personnel was in the astronomical region of 625 per thousand. Thus, taking the four colonies together, in 1943 the civil authorities treated some 62,000 cases of venereal disease in a population of 261/4 million ; while in 1944 the Army treated 27,800 such cases out of about 60,000 African troops. It is evident from these figures that only a few drops are being pipetted from a vast cesspool, and it is to be hoped that future methods employed in tackling this problem will include not only better treatment for the small nucleus already secured but an imaginative scheme aimed at substantial portions of the whole.That there are regions of comparative freedom is shown in the difference in the numbers involved in the Gambia and, say, Nigeria. In 1938 Purcell2 said he had treated over 5000 cases of yaws in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast in a tribe where there was no gonorrhoea. Therefore even in the more infected or clinical syphilis. 1. Willcox, R. R. Brit. J. vener. Dis. 1946, 22, 65. 2. Purcell, F. W. W. Afr. med. J. 1938, 7, 96.