THE EAR OF MAN. 1 89 



At the present day we owe our knowledge of audition 

 and its apparatus mainly to the French, German and 

 Swedish anatomists of the past half-century. For not- 

 withstanding: the fact that the earlier Italian school 

 had paid much attention to the auditory organ, they 

 did not make any noteworthy contributions to our 

 knowledge. 



With all honor to the large number of workers in this 

 field who have added facts from this side and that, and 

 without whose labors it would have been far more 

 difficult for the more recent writers to have accomplished 

 their comparative studies and to have formed their 

 generalizations, there are a few names among them 

 which stand out in greater prominence than the rest, 

 and to whose investigations we owe the facts which, 

 when properly combined, furnish us with a solution of 

 the problems of the origin of the ear and of its exist- 

 ing condition. They further allow us to predict with 

 reasonable certainty the course which it will pursue 

 in its further development. In other words, their in- 

 vestigations of the ear enable us to understand its 

 past, its present and its future. 



First among these names are those of C. Hasse of 

 Germany and Gustav Retzius of Sweden, John Beard 

 of England and E. P. Allis of our own country. 



The two first mentioned have, by extended investiga- 

 tions into the structure of the adult condition of the 

 internal ear of a large number of species, representing 

 every important group of vertebrates, built up a com- 

 parative anatomy of the internal ear upon an anatomical 

 basis alone. They have also given accurate descriptions 

 and figures of the forms thus studied, which render 



