10 
Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. [Sess. 
II. — Observations on the Auditory Organ in the Cetacea. 
By Principal Sir Wm. Turner, K.C.B., D.C.L., F.R.S. 
(Read December 1, 1913. MS. received December 2, 1913.) 
Early in September of this year I received from the Falkland Islands 
a box, dispatched by Mr G. Millen Coughtrey, a former student of the 
University, now an employe in the New Zealand Whaling Company. It 
contained a number of specimens which illustrated the anatomy of the 
auditory apparatus in the Cetacea. The whales were caught in the South 
Atlantic, mostly at South Shetland, though some were from Graham’s Land, 
at which place he had been whaling last season. 
External Auditory Meatus and Earwax. 
The Cetacea do not possess an auricle or pinna of the ear. A small 
external opening capable of admitting a probe may be seen, when carefully 
looked for, at the side of the head, behind the outer angle of the eye. It 
is the orifice of the external auditory meatus, which penetrates the cutis 
and the thickness of the blubber to reach the tympano-petrous bone in 
which the essential parts of the organ of hearing are situated. The length 
of the meatus varies in different species. The lumen of the meatus may 
easily be overlooked, but it widens in its course, especially as it approaches 
the tympanic bone. It is usually destroyed in removing the blubber,* and 
has not received much attention in cetological literature. 
The presence in it of a ceruminous secretion, the earwax, has, however, 
been occasionally noted. Thomas Buchanan, surgeon in Hull nearly a 
century ago,f described and figured in 1828 dissections of the meatus and 
tympanum in the Greenland whale, Balcena mysticetus. He saw in the 
meatus an unctuous cerumen of a greyish-blue colour, “but in no great 
quantity.” He thought that the collapsed state of the orifice, the great 
length of the meatus, its winding course, a valve-like obstruction about its 
middle, and the unctuous secretion tended to prevent the passage of sea 
water down the auditory canal, in which none was present in the specimens 
* Robert Gray, “ Auricular Opening and External Auditory Meatus in Balcena 
mysticetus Journal Anat. and Phys ., vol. xxiii., 1889. 
t Physiological Illustrations of the Organ of Hearing , London, 1828. Hull at that time 
was the great shipping port of the whaling industry. 
