NINTH LECTURE.^ 



-»<'X»4«><^ 



THE EAR OF MAN: 



ITS PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE. 

 By HOWARD AYERS. 



The study of the human ear, its structure and its 

 functions, is not alone a modern endeavor on the part of 

 man to *'know" himself; for history tells us, that the 

 Greek philosophers and anatomists sought, both by 

 dissection and physiological experimentation, to ascer- 

 tain the anatomy of the organ, and how it is that we 

 hear by the ear. The extent of their knowledge we do 

 not know, for most of their anatomical treatises are 

 lost to us. 



Empedocles, 473 years B.C., referred the perception 

 of sound to the cochlea ; and Aristotle (384 b.c.) was 

 acquainted not only with the internal ear of the higher 

 vertebrates, but with that of fishes as well. 



The Egyptian school of anatomists does not seem to 

 have progressed beyond the knowledge borrowed from 

 the Greeks. 



1 The memoir, of which this lecture is an abstract, will be issued in the 

 jfournal of Morphology ^ Vol. IV., No. 3. 

 188 



