Omphalos: An Attempt to Untie the Geological Knot

by Philip Henry Gosse

The stature of the Man before me is about six feet. An infant at birth is from eighteen to twenty-one inches in length. At ten years old the average stature is about four feet. Six feet may be taken as the full adult height of man; and this is attained from the twenty-first to the twenty-fifth year. The stature of this individual would therefore indicate an age not less than twenty-one years.

On the front of the throat I perceive a strongly-marked, angular prominence, formed by the union of the two plates of the thyroid cartilage. The prominence of this angle is due to the enlargement of the larynx; and it is accompanied by a deepening of the pitch of the voice, producing the full rich sounds that we have this instant heard, as the Man chanted his song of praise. These tones, and this projection of the thyroid cartilage, are equally distinctive marks of puberty, and do not appear till about the sixteenth or seventeenth year.

The chin, and sides of the face, are clothed with a dense bush of crisp hair,—the beard. This is a distinctive mark of the adolescent period, and may be taken as indicating an age not less than twenty years.

On again examining the mouth, I find the teeth are thirty-two in number; viz., four incisors, two canines, four pre-molars, and six true molars, in each jaw. None of these existed (at least visibly) during the first seven years of life; in that period they were represented by the milk-teeth of infancy. The appearance of the middle pair of incisors occurred at about the eighth year; the lateral incisors at nine; the first pre-molars at ten; the second at eleven; the canines at about twelve; the second molars at thirteen or fourteen; and the third molars, or dentes sapientiæ, at about seventeen or eighteen.

The state of the dentition, then, points to an age certainly not less than the period just named. How much more it may be, we must gather from other sources.

I come now to certain phenomena which are not appreciable to us on mere external examination; but which I am able with certainty to predicate. And the first of these is the proportion of arterial to venous blood in the capillaries. In infancy, the arterial capillaries contain far more blood than the capillary veins; in old age, the proportion is exactly reversed; whereas, in maturity, the ratio is just equal. Now, here there is a very small preponderance of arterial blood, indicating a period but slightly remote from maturity on the side of youth; well agreeing with the conclusion arrived at from previous premises, of some twenty to five-and-twenty years.

Other and more marked manifestations occur in the condition of the skeleton. In the spine, I find the spinous and transverse processes of the several vertebræ are completed by separate epiphyses, the ossification of which does not commence till after puberty, and the final union of which with the body of the bone does not occur till about the age of twenty-five years.

Each vertebra, moreover, has attained a smooth annular plate of solid bone, covering a surface that was previously rough and fissured, which is invariably added at the same period.

The ossification of the sacrum also has reached its culminating point. At the age of puberty, the component vertebræ began to unite from below upwards, and the two highest have now coalesced; which also marks a period of life not earlier than the twenty-fifth year. The whole united mass, moreover, is furnished on each side with thin bony plates, the appearance of which is no less characteristic of the same age.

Each of the ribs is here furnished with two epiphyses, one for the head and the other for the tubercle; the ossification of these began soon after puberty; but their union with the body of the bone, as presented here, has taken several years to accomplish.