The daily morning journal and courier., 1901-03-28
EARS AND CHARACTER.

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 Lombroso's Theory Questioned-An Ex-
 animation of All Kinds of People and
 a Few Apes.
 A simple, workable, absolutely trust
 worthy system is still urgently wanted
 for the detection of criminals, and II
 Miriam Anne Ellis in her book on the
 human ear has succeeded she certainly
 deserves the thanks of all the govern
 ments of Europe Whatever worth her
 method may have when it comes to be
 applied practically, it has some decided
 drawbacks when the data are examined
 on which it is founded.
 It so happened that about seven years
 ago the reviewer came to the conclusion
 that the external ear ought to yield
 some clew to the relationship of man
 and ape, and of one race of man to an-
 other. As is well known, the characters
 of the ear are fully inherited and afford
 fairly trustworthy clews to family re-
 lationship, of which the authoress gives
 some good illustrations. Founding his
 method of observation and classification
 on data derived from q study of the de-
 velopment and comparative anatomy of
 the external ear, the reviewer proceed w " tAolilIile ny IuHdlSl9 thS Nui lOho peoples and races living on the shores
 of the North Sea, first on the continen- tai side, then on the British, to see how
 far the data he accumulated would sup
 port the semi traditional accounts
 available concerning the early Saxon invasions of Britain. These observa-
 tions were continued into the Highlands
 of Scotland, to Ireland and Wales. To test the criminal mark" theory of
 Lombroso and many others he exam 1 ined the ears of more than eight hun
 dred confirmed criminals, and of more
 than two thousand inmates of asylums
 for the insane, situated in parts of the country where he had already examined the ears of the sane Altogether the ears of more than forty thousand peo- pie of different races and of different moralities, besides those of about three hundred apes and anthropoids, were ex- amined, but the total results of this elaborate investigation were almost en- tirely of negative nature.
 | The authoress appears to take it for granted, and evidently has not inquired into the matter that the ear of the criminal Is peculiar If the reviewers methods and observations are correct the confirmed criminals ear is the ear of the average inhabitant of Great Brit ain. Nor did the ears of the insane diff fer on an average from those of the people from which they were drawn, and if the authoress had carried her ob servations over a number of men of genius or of high ability, instead of drawing elaborate deductions from sim gle observations. she would probably have arrived at similar conclusion as to them.
 The great difficulty in a matter of this kind is to arrive at a method of classi- fcation and it is in this that all the sys- tems propounded break down when ap- piled practically, and the system pro- pounded here Is worse than those that have gone before 1t. In her classfica- tion the first division is a separation of ears Into CD large, (2) medium and (O small. Unfortunately, she proposes no definite measurements, but if she did 1t would be found that great proportion of ears fell on the limits of the medium line and it would be matter of the greatest difficultyf to say to which of the great divisions it belonged. There is another great obstacle to the applica tion of measurement of the ear to de- tection of criminals, of which the au- thoress is unaware As Schwalbe show ed years ago, and as the authoress may | verify and quiet half hour during ser mon time, the ear in the later decades | of life undergoes a very considerable | growth-enough to shift the ear of a | woman aged forty from the medium di- vision to the large division when she is aged sixty.
 The authoress has used one of the most variable and untrustWorthy feat ures of the human ear for the purpose of subdividing and indexing the forms in which it is found. She detects in it's helix the upper and posterior border of the ear) five divisions, separated by in- dentations more or less marked. The three small groups of large medium and small ears are subdivided according to which and how many of these divisions of the helix are present. In many cases no two observers would agree as to the number of helical subdivisions present, which is not remarka ble when it is re- membered that the helix of the posterior border is vestigial structure, the re- suit of the unfolding of the free margin of the ear. The amount of unfolding does not indicate, as the authoress SUD- poses, certain psychological peculiari- ties, but merely the degree of retrogres- sion in the ear examined. Like all truly vestigial structures, the infolded mar gin of the helix is subject to such variety of forms that it defies cassifi- oation
 One or two interesting, although mi nor, points might also be mentioned The statement that the length of the ear depends on the length of the nose md that the measurement of the one is identical with that of the other will be {, 'ound on trial to be the exception and l lot the invariable rule. In most ana- | omical works the relation of the q breadth to the length of the ear is used ( IS method of classification; quite lseless one, in the reviewers optnion.-- Nature.