THE SCAFFOLDING LEFT IN THE BODY. 89 



Now, bearing in mind this theory of the origin 

 of ears, an extraordinary corroboration confronts us. 

 Ears are actually sometimes found bursting out in 

 human beings half-way down the neck, in the exact 

 position — namely, along the line of the anterior 

 border of the sterno-mastoid muscle — which the 

 gill-slits would occupy if they still persisted. In 

 some human families, where the tendency to retain 

 these special structures is strong, one member 

 sometimes illustrates the abnormality by possessing 

 the clefts alone, another has a cervical ear, while a 

 third has both a cleft and a neck-ear — all these, 

 of course, in addition to the ordinary ears. This 

 cervical auricle has all the characters of the 

 ordinary ear, " it contains yellow elastic cartilage, 

 is skin-covered, and has muscle-fibre attached to 

 it." 1 Dr. Sutton calls attention to the fact that on 

 ancient statues of fauns and satyrs cervical auricles 

 are sometimes found, and he figures the head of a 

 satyr from the British Museum, carved long before 

 the days of anatomy, where a sessile ear on the neck 

 is quite distinct. A still better illustration may be 

 seen in the Art Museum at Boston on a full-sized 

 cast of a faun, belonging to the later Greek period ; 

 and there are other examples in the same building. 

 One interest of these neck-ears in statues is that they 

 are not, as a rule, modelled after the human ear, but 

 taken from the cervical ear of the goat, from which 

 the general idea of the faun was derived. This shows 

 that neck-ears were common on the goats of that 

 period — as they are on goats to this day. The occur' 



1 Sutton, Evolution and Disease, p. 87. 



