142 



The teeth are on the whole strong, but much worn. Only 

 once I saw a carious tooth. They are often rather misplaced, 

 but holes in the series of teeth are so to speak never seen, 

 not even in old people in whom they are nearly worn away. 

 The eye-teeth are often chisel-formed. 



As to the outer ear I shall lead the attention to an 

 anomaly of form which I found in the great majority of the 

 individuals observed. The ear being else well-formed, not less 

 than 36 of 44, examined on this question, were found to have 

 the little lobulus auris grown fast with its front edge in its 

 whole extent to the skin of the face, and lobulus was in most 

 cases moreover so small that there really was no one at all. 

 Only in one individual, a grown-up man, it was found tolerably 

 well developped on both sides; in one it was present on the 

 right side, but not on the left, and in the resting 6 it was only 

 present by way of suggestion. 



As is well known, the want of lobulus auris like anomalies 

 of form of the outer ear on the whole have been looked upon 

 as one of the outward signs of intellectual or moral degene- 

 ration by many anthropologists and criminaUsts. Starting by this 

 hypothesis numerous statistics have been collected in prisons 

 and lunatic asylums to show the special frequency of such 

 anomalies in criminals and deranged persons. But the material 

 was collected starting by a preconceived hypothesis, and later 

 examinations and comparisons with the outward ear of normal 

 individuals have shown that the examination is utterly doubtful. 



But it is a fact that heredity asserts itself very much in 

 this domain, the same anomaly of the form of the ear being 

 very generally seen to repeat itself generation after generation. 

 That the said peculiarity of the outward ear of the East-Green- 

 landers might be due to a mere accident, is scarcely probable; 

 it is too frequent for that. That it might have any relation 

 whatever with what is called with one word degeneration is 

 naturally excluded, and its exceedingly frequent presence in 



