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to the head as in most living Apes, and had it as little mobility 

 as theirs ? 



Darwin ascertained that neither the Orang nor the 

 Chimpanzee ever erects or moves its ears. I have seen Macacus 

 viaurus move its ear slightly, and some men retain this power, 

 although it is questionable whether this movement is due to the 

 extrinsic muscles of the organ, as Darwin appears to have believed, 

 or to the contraction of the scalp. It is certain that beyond the 

 power possessed by many persons of moving both their ears 

 simultaneously with their eyebrows and the skin of the nape, some 

 few can move the whole ear quite independently of the scalp ; and 

 I have observed a case in which the upper half of the ear could 

 be vibrated at will, either rapidly or slowly, whilst the lobe and 

 lower half of the same organ, the eyebrows, and scalp remained 

 motionless. 



Whether these movements are due to the muscles of the ear 

 or no, such muscles exist in Man, and their existence argues past 

 use in our ancestral form. As a matter of fact, the external ear 

 in both Man and the Quadruroana is an atrophied organ in several 

 respects, mobility for one. But evidence of mobility is foreign to 

 the present enquiry except as affording concurrent testimony as to 

 the conditions of the ancestral ear, which almost certainly moved 

 freely. A freely moving ear must needs project, and a projecting 

 ear is exposed and seems to require (and usually possesses) a 

 special hairy covering of its own. To-day the normal human ear 

 is almost hairless, frequently indeed quite nude. It is practically 

 sessile. Whether at one time it projected laterally seems a fair 

 subject for investigatioa, and to this question the existence of 

 hairs upon its back affords a clue. 



Where the ear is pressed closely to the head as in most of 

 the Quadrumana, its back is almost naked : it was quite bare in 

 the Gibbon which I examined. An ear thus placed is obviously 

 protected from weather either by the fur in which it is embedded, 

 as in the Gibbon, or by the long tresses which fall over it from 

 the sides of the head in the Orang and Chimpanzee. Even the 

 thick short bristly hair of the Goi'illa affords an efficient pro- 

 tection, and it is not easy to get sight of the back of its ears, even 

 when the ear is handled. A special hairy covering for an ear so 

 placed is needless, a tuft in the orifice to exclude rain being all 

 that is needed and usually all that exists. Except a very few 

 weak hairs in Gorilla, the Anthropoids have lost the hair upon 

 the back of the ear so far as my observations extend, Avhich is not 

 far, for Anthropoid Apes are neither abundant nor easy to ex- 

 amine. Their ears seem subject to much variation. 



