Evening Star Newspaper, June 29, 1930, Page 91

The rhinoceros hornbill not only has too much beak, but piled on top he has an extra helping of no imaginable use to him. (Peld Musem Pho'‘e.) BY FRANK THONE. HAT would you do if your uppes eyetesth started to get longer and longer, curling outward and forward until they were a cou- ple of feet long? You'd learn to get on with the new adorne ment, of course. Especially if all yvour neighbors were becoming similarly decorated and nobody poked fun at you for lpoking that way. Some of us get used to having mighty queer-lookling faces or legs or feet, as it is. Zortunately, we of the human race have not had to do much of that sort of thing. We do have some troubles with organs and parts of ourselves that seem to have degenerated in the course of evolution, like our wisdom teeth and our appendixes, but nothing seems to have gone on a rampage of embarrassing over-growth. But if we look about us at the world of ani- mals, we can see case after case where changes of that kind seem to have taken place beyond any need of them. There are hundreds, even thousands of species in all classes of the animal kingdom that have teeth or horns, or wings, ot feathers, or scales, or hair that can't be ealled anything but simply overgrow.:. And yet the animals so ali2cled get along all right and even find uses for these strangely overdeveloped organs. The elephant, to choose one of the most extreme cases at the outset, has had terrible trouble with his eyeteeth through all the ages. Now they are longer than his legs. Yet he gets along all right. He has got past the barrier these overgrown eye- teeth put between himself and his food by growing his nose into an extra arm and hand. And the teeth themselves he has learned how to use as helpful tools in grubbing up things and as formidable weapons. Yet there can hardly be a question but that at the outset the elephant didn't really want his tusks. They were, in a sense, wished on him. The aboriginal elephant stock, the strange small animals from which elephants have descended, did not have big tusks. Somewhat overdeveloped eyeteeth would be very useful, as the modcrate tusks of pigs still are. The trouble with the elephant's ancestor was that once the tusks got going they appar- ently didn't know when to quit, and they even- tually developed into the tremendous tusks ear- ried by mastodons and mammoths. T'S queer how the eyeteeth like to do that sort of thing in all kinds of unrelated ani- mals. The male walrus grows a wicked prong of ivory, too. The walrus’ upper eyeteeth didn' turn forward as the elephant’s did, but they are disproportionately long, just the same. The walrus, like the elephant, has learned to make use of his tusks. He grubs for shellfish on the bottom of the bay, and he can use them with telling effect in a fight. But for all that, you are left with the very distinct feeling that he got the things somehow and had to find a use for them afterward. Then there is the case of the wild hogs. There are many species of wild swine in the world, but they all tend to develop pronounced tusks. The ones sported by the European wild boar are of moderate size and undoubted usefulness. They haven't got out of bounds. But the tusks of some of the tropical species in the Orient reach fearful and wonderful lengths. There is, in especial, the Babiroussa. In this species the upper tusks of the male animal are turned back upon themselves. They grow upward through the top of the snout, and then sweep backward in a wide curve, in some extreme cases reach- ing down again and touching the beast’'s fore- head—even growing into it. Obviously, such tusks have lost their value as either tools or weapons. BUTteethmbynomeans the only part of the body that can run wild once they start. Horns are even more given to unwieldy lengths and bizarre growth. A walk through the Afri- ean mammal section of any zoo or museum leaves you with the impression that the whole antelope tribe has inherited, like an ancestral eurse, an overload of horn. And whole sec- Sions of deer and sheep families, too, have beem AHE SUNDAY STAR, WASHIN ANIMAL GTON, D. C, JUNE 29, 1930. FREAKS 1 'hat Puzzle Science. Overgrown Teeth, Horns and Feathers That Somehow Got Going Stop Give Evolutio and 1hen Could Not nists Some Difficult Problems to Answer. Fish-eye view of the flamingo. His body is above water, and you see only his legs and head breaking through the surface to the bottom. His beak looks like & good scoop, but really it makes it hard for him to eat. " (Buffalo Museum Photo of dowered with more horns than they really need for adequate defense. It makes no difference whether the horns are permanent, as in cattle and sheep, or whether they come off and have to be grown anew each year, as in the deer. They grow tc an unwieldy size just the same. As a matter of fact, in the deer family at Jeast, the homns do pot seem to be especially useful as weapons, at least against predatory enemies. The females do not have them and are unarmed from Spring until Fall, y defend themselves and the helpless the same. The best weapons of a against a wolf are his hoofs; old- the West say that a mule-deer doe coyote to pieces with her sharp front icker than a man could kill it with a b. overgrown antlers seem to be useful in the titanic head-on wrestling bouts hardly call them fights) between the during the mating season. And the ve curled horns of mountain rams seem about three-fourths extra growth. If a -baa hits you, he likes to do it with the middle of his forehead; all the surplus horn just sticks out as useless ornament. ‘This notion that a lot of things that are con- spicuously developed in the animal kingdom are really of no particular use to their possessors, but have got that way simply because they got started and couldn’t stop, may seem at first somewhat heretical. Certainly it doesn’'t agree particularly well with either the earlier notions about evolution or with the old notion, be- loved by the schoolmen, that everything has its use. The strictest and simplest Darwinism would demand that we find an explanation for all these overlength tusks and outsize horns in their “survival value.” The simon-purest Dar- winian doctrine envisaged a world where changes took place little by little. If a change was advantageous, it was picked out and en- couraged by natural selection; if disadvanta- geous, it was discouraged and eliminated by the same sifting process in which the unfit were killed off. g € v5%§ E‘E g Painting by Wilfrid Bronson.) SO an 11-foot tusk or a 6-foot horn must be something very advantageous to the owner. The trouble was that such advantages were not always evident, even after careful examination. One of the evolutionary theories that is even older than Darwin's, that of Lamarck. doesn’t fit the case any better. Lamarck's idea was that the animals got the changes that came upon them by working for them. The often- cited girafie’s neck, that grew long because gen- erations of giraffes stretched to reach tree branches, is a fair illustration. But what an elephant would do to achieve tusks too long for his own convenience, or how hard a rhinoceros must work in order to develop a 3-foot horn when a 1-foot one would be as effective, the theory fails to tell. And the pre-evolutionary idea that all these things were specially created for the animal's own use is even harder to‘maintain if one really tries to find out how the animals use all the surplus beyond a reasonable means of attaining their ends. If a 4-foot tusk is enough for an elephant to work and fight with, why lavish twice as much ivory on him? The partial answer to the riddle of over- development of horns or tusks or feathers, or whatnot, that these represent normal and use- ful developments that have gone past the point where they should have stopped, has been called ‘“orthogenesis” by some scientists. That's a Greek word, or rather two Greek words, and it means something like “single-track develop- ment.” For “ortho” means straight or direct and ‘‘genesis” means getting born or coming into existence. Besides the teeth and horn we have already looked at, there are feathers. Birds are most likely descended from reptiles, and feathers were probably at one time something extra fancy in the way of scales. But having achieved the ends of warmth and flight and beautification, they often keep right on growing. Long tail feathers are common, from the relatively modest array of the ring- neck pheasant to the amazing developments of such fowl as the peacock and the lyre bird. Beaks are another thing of which birds often get an awkward overdose. There is the rhinoc- 19 e — R The pretentious plumage of the lyres bird seems to be just a good idea that got started and then wouldn’t stop. eros hornbill, which has a beak nearly a8 long as his body, so big that it gets in his way when he wants to eat. And the enormous eme crescence of a crest is of no apparent use. Even the beak of the fla'ningo, that looks Mke a highly efficient tool for picking small shellfish and similar tidbits out of the bottom silt, ism't an unqualified success. For it really makes eating harder for him than a rtraight beak. (Copyright, 1930.) ]llo;zey.’ Nyl oney! Continued from Fouriccuth Page ; place, for instance, and Bennie and good old Dodd.” As he stood looking down at her with a grim expression on his square-iawed face, Jean's own expression was injured. “You needn't be so superior. Of course, Id do something for them, too,” she replied hotly, Grabbing up his hat, he turned on his hesl abruptly: “I'm not so sure about that. they came first with you. Now you never give them a thought. And though I used to kid you about being a spendthrift, I loved you for the miracles you did with what you had. But you've changed. You're hard and ecold, Jean, All you seem to tHink about is that money.” ¥ And yet, though they parted in anger, and it was weeks before they even met again, it was Tad who came to tell her of the disaster whieh followed her investment in Haines' ofl well. At first she had thought the rift betweem them a temporary one. But when time passed and Tad made no effort to bridge it, she had become disquieted and afraid. “It was absurd of Tad to misjudge me. Here, when I'm worried to death about the gamble I've taken on this oil well, he stays off pouting,* she was thinking one evening, when suddenly she heard the gate click and lookeé up to see Tad's tall figure striding down the walk. “Well, Ulysses,” she was beginning, when one glance at his grim face che-ked her. “I've bad news, Jean,” he said brusquely. “Haines sent me. The wells a dud. Salt water.” Six months ago SHE paled. A shudder swept through her slender frame. Slowly, in an effort to steady herself, she put a hand on the verands post. Por a paralyzing second she stood looke ing daszedly at Tad, who was regarding het sternly, a8 if destiny itself hung on her wpe sponse. Then, suddenly, the tight cords which had bound her head and heart these many months were snapped. Lige an escaped prisoner, she lifted herself erect. It was as if a sudden burs¢ of sunlight had penetrated a heavy fog bank, With a revealing flash of discernment she ume derstood what lay behind the accusing gravity of Tad's eyes. Money had corrupted her. Shackled hes, Dwarfed her. Twisted and distorted her whole scale of values. It had reversed the current of her thought and feeling, turning it backward and inward, instead of outward to the Bennies and Miss Perrys of the world. And it was, she kniew, this uniovely, stunted thing which money had made of her that Tad was seeing as, em a harsh and challenging note, he repeated: “Your money's gone, Jean. Every cent of ¥, you understood?” “Yes, I understand. Every red sou of it is gone and—I'm glad,” she told him, like eme’ released. “Glad?” * She looked at him beseechingly. “Don’t hate me, Tad. Some people camn stand prosperity and some can't. I must ke one of those who can't.” She laughed shakily, “Now that I've lost that wretched $10,000 X see that I'm rich enough to buy movie tickets for Miss Perry and cream cheese for Mr. Dodd and—" with a hesitant, questioning “to—to—marry a struggling young lawyer.” For a moment they faced each other, eyes gazing steadily into eyes. Then, as Tad’s hand closed over hers in a tight, warm grip: 5 “Come on. Let’s get a chicken and barbe= cue it. I'm simply starved,” she laughed.