Tetrapodisis

"What is that which is fourfooted, three-footed and two-footed?" That horrendous bogey, the ancient Theban Sphinx, who had the face of a woman, the feet and tail of a lion, and the wings of a bird, ate up the Thebans who could not guess her riddle.* Smart Oedipus answered her: Man, who goes on allfours as a baby, on two legs as an adult, on two legs and a cane in old age. Whereupon the vexed Sphinx threw herself from a mountain.

Few U. S. parents could have answered the Theban Sphinx, for like Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, famed Bohemian-born doctor of medicine and physical anthropologist with the U. S. National Museum, they have rarely seen children walking like little bears. In 1927 and 1928 Dr. Hrdlicka wrote three learned papers on the subject of walking-on-all-fours. Only 41 cases could he locate, so he decided it was a rarity, gave it a Greekish name, tetrapodisis.

Last week appeared Dr. Savas T. Nittis. 34, a member of the department of internal medicine at the University of Michigan medical school, to confute Dr. Hrdlicka on the rarity of tetrapodisis. Dr. Nittis, graduate of the University of Athens, is a Greek born on the British-owned island of Cyprus. According to Dr. Nittis, children there always amble about on all fours before they walk upright. Dr. Nittis never saw them go otherwise before he migrated to the U. S. He inquired of other Greeks, of Near Easterners, of Balkanese. Their children did likewise. The apparent rarity of tetrapodisis in the U. S., he decided, was because in cities and modern homes the movements of young children are very much restricted. In his opinion the U. S. child has no room to trot like a little bear between the time when it crawls like a big frog and the time when it walks like a little man.

*The Sphinx of Thebes is not to be confused with the male Sphinx of Giza, in Egypt. Assyria, the Grecian and pre-Grecian settlements in Asia Minor, the Mayans of Yucatan also had their sphinxes.

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