REMOTELY ANCESTRAL?

The spectral tarsier, illustrated on our cover this week, is one of the most interesting and at the same time least known of the primitive primates. If man’s ancestry is not to be traced to a union with the great-ape stock in comparatively recent times, as one school of paleontologists is inclined to believe, then it is not impossible that the human race goes back, parallel with the apes, to a lemuroid creature of this general type.

The tarsier, however, has some special developments that indicate some divergence from a truly primitive condition. Especially notable are the finger pads—sticky discs that enable it to climb smooth surfaces with ease. The animal needs to be a safe and sure climber, for it is nocturnal as well as arboreal in its habits.

It has one characteristic that from the human viewpoint is highly laudable: utter fidelity to its mate. When one is captured its companion is usually taken, too.

Our illustration is reproduced through the courtesy of Charles Hose, an Englishman with a long and notable record of administrative work and natural history observation in the Eastern tropics. He is the author of Natural Man and Fifty Years of Romance.

NEW DRESS STYLES DRAW CENSURE

"An unmitigated evil," "unhealthful," "deplorable," "unfortunate" are some of the comments of leading physicians when asked by Science Service to give their opinions of the newest styles of women’s dress. These doctors have considered the probable effect on women’s health of a return to dress styles of an earlier age. They agree that woman today is healthier than she was in the days of tight-fitting corsets and long, sweeping dresses.

Recalling the long full skirts worn 20 years ago, these physicians also recalled the germ-laden clouds of dust and dried dirt that these skirts raised when women walked along the streets. The trailing skirt was considered a menace to the woman’s own health and to that of others about her.

These physicians remembered, too, the tightly-corseted figure of some years ago. They remembered how the liver and spleen were pushed up out of their normal, proper place in the body, and the intestines crowded down by the tight lacing necessary to achieve a "wasp waist."

Of course, the newest dresses are not wasp-waisted, and street dresses do not yet sweep the ground—far from it. However, many forward-looking persons are asking whether the latest fashion of longer skirts, form-fitted dresses, and corsets will stop where it is, or whether it will not swing all the way back to the extremes of the gay ‘90s and the early 1900s.