58 SIR WILLIAM FLOWER CHAP. 



the centre of the south gallery of the central room 

 of the Museum. Every mammal, from man down- 

 wards, has three very small bones in the ear, as 

 delicate as the machinery of a watch, and, like the 

 machinery of a watch, worked by springs and levers. 

 As the membranes are very sensitive, the whole 

 apparatus is perhaps more comparable to the 

 mechanism of an aneroid barometer. But its 

 delicacy can be guessed. The three bones are 

 called the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup, and in 

 man the stirrup bone is about the size of the letter 

 A in the type here used. Sometimes two of these 

 bones become united. But they are a very in- 

 teresting and constant feature in the mammalia. 

 All of these bones are set out in small round boxes 

 on a black ground, from the ear bones of the whales 

 to those of the smallest shrew, mice, and jerboas. 

 The work was done by Dr. Alban Doran. 



Passing round these galleries the visitor of 

 to-day may read the story of Flower's work there 

 in its sequence both of logic and of time. What he 

 does not necessarily gather is the novelty and 

 originality of this at the time when it was done. It 

 was practically the provision of a new and synoptic 

 work of graphic reference. The development and 

 difference of the outer and inner skeletons, the 

 various joints, and their modifications in the whole 

 mammalian race, the ligaments which hold up and 

 tie the parts together, the muscles which work 

 the joints, the organs of sense which suggest when 



