When a baby is born, it has a soft spot on the top of its head where the bones of the skull have not, yet grown together.
This place is called the "fontanel." By the time a child reaches eighteen months, the bones have fused to close this spot. The point on the skull where the resulting seams join is called the "bregma" from the Greek word for "front of the head," brechmos, which is also an ancestor of the word brain. In actual fact the baby is born with two such fontanels; the other is farther back on the head and smaller and closes over by about three months.
The word fontanel comes from a French word meaning "little fountain" and is used in other applications to describe a small opening, sometimes one through which fluids may come out, as they do in a fountain-something we hope never happens with our fontanels.
No comments:
Post a Comment