SOCIETY OP THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN. 217 



THE EESULTS OF AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION 

 OF THE EXTERNAL EAR. 



By ARTHUR KEITH, M.D. (Aberd.), F.R.C.S., Lecturer on Anatomy at the 

 London Hospital Medical College ; Examiner in Anatomy, Royal 

 College of Surgeons, England. 



(Presented 16th June, 1906.) 



This paper, if its full history may be told, really commenced in 

 an early day of May some two and twenty years ago when, with some 

 forty companions, I entered the dissecting-room of Marischal College 

 to prepare myself for the practice of medicine. Yet the subject with 

 which it deals is not, properly speaking, one which lies within the 

 bounds of practical medicine, nor have the means by which I have 

 earned a livelihood since we sat in the benches which you now 

 occupy been those usually employed by medical men. It is strange 

 that the circumstances which determine the main course of a man's 

 life are those which appear at the time to be trivial and passing, for 

 I now see, looking back over those years, that on the morning I 

 entered the dissecting-room I had turned aside, unconsciously, into a 

 side path of medicine. 



The dissecting-room has been altered much since then ; men and 

 methods have changed with the times. Physical anthropology as a 

 separate branch of study was confined then to France ; had the 

 instruction and the means which Professor Reid has made free to 

 you been accessible to me, it would have saved me many a vain en- 

 deavour and made my work of higher value. It is strange that all 

 details relating to dissecting and to reading in the dissecting-room 

 have left no trace in my memory now, b;:l there remains fresh as 



yesterday the impression of a man who, as he lectured, and as he 



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