218 PROCEEDINGS OF THE ANATOMICAL AND ANTHUOPOLOGICAL 



taught, took us up into the region of research, to the verge where 

 men work from the known into the unknown, and infused into us 

 something of his enthusiasm and independence of judgment. 



That was the living influence which fascinated and turned me 

 aside, but the words that directed my steps came through books ; 

 books by Owen, books by Huxley, books by Darwin. It seemed to 

 me then, and the conviction has remained, that the course in life which 

 was most worth striving for was the one most likely to help in 

 answering the questions : When, where and how did man, and the 

 races of men, arise ? It was years later that I discovered that all 

 inquiries and observations which are made, in order that these ques- 

 tions may be answered, constitute the subject known now as anthro- 

 pology. 



Like many others, I had become an anthropologist unconsciously, 

 and this paper, which you have afforded me the pleasure of contri- 

 buting to your Proceedings in a year when our University is entering 

 another century of beneficence, contains the results of one of those 

 inquiries, and it may have value to you because of its failures and of 

 its negative rather than of its positive conclusions. In the matter of 

 conduct we often learn more from failures than from success. 



My observations on the ear were commenced in the summer of 

 1895, when I was studying in Leipzig. The methods which Dr. 

 Beddoe was then employing to analyse and classify British races by 

 ol (serving and estimating their degree of pigmentation, a method 

 which happily combined travel and observation, undoubtedly sug- 

 gested to me that a complicated structure such as the external ear, 

 which is admittedly characteristic of families, was suitable for such a 

 method of observation, would be likely to give important clues to the 

 relation of one race of mankind to another, and of one species of 

 animal to another. It seemed well worth trying to see if an inquiry 

 into the forms of ear found in the peoples along the western shores of 

 the North Sea bore any direct relationship to those found in the 

 people of our country, as one would expect if the history of invasions 

 by Saxon, Jute, Angle and Dane are historically true. 



