_Position of the Ear._—Every one who has paid the least attention to Egyptian art, has observed the elevated position which is given to the ear; and I have examined my entire series of heads, in order to ascertain whether this peculiarity has any existence in nature, but I can find nothing in them to confirm it. The bony meatus presents no deviation from the usual relative arrangement of parts; but the cartilaginous structure being desiccated, and consequently contracted, may not afford satisfactory evidence. Clot Bey and other authors have remarked an elevation of the ear in some modern Copts; and the traveller Raw, quoted by Virey, notices the same feature in the Hindoos, and it is said also to exist in degree in the Jews. There may, therefore, be _some_ foundation for this peculiarity of Egyptian sculpture and painting; but I feel confident that in nature it is nothing more than an upward elongation of the auricular cartilages, without any modification of the bony meatus. It has also occurred to me that the appearance in question may be sometimes owing to the remarkable vertical length of the upper jaw in some heads (those represented Plate IV., Fig. 2, and Plate V., Fig. 2, for example,) in which it is manifest that the ear would possess a remarkable elevation in respect to the maxillary bones, without being any nearer to the top of the head than usual. These hints may possibly afford some clew to a satisfactory explanation of an almost invariable rule of Egyptian art. Dr. Prichard (Researches Vol. II., p. 251,) has given an abstract of some observations made by M. De La Malle, on the mummies contained in the Museum of Turin. “In the skulls of these [six] mummies, as well as in many others brought from the same country, although the facial angle was not different from that of European heads, the meatus auditorius, instead of being situated in the same plane with the basis of the nose, was found by M. De Malle to be exactly on a level with the centre of the eye”! Unless M. De Malle is an anatomist, and accustomed to comparisons of this kind, I can imagine that he might be deceived by the mere position in which the head was placed for inspection; for the more the face is drawn downward, the higher will be the relative position of the ear, until it may be brought on a level either with the nostrils or the eye, at option. I am the more disposed to offer this suggestion because we are told that in the mummies in question “the facial angle was not different from that of European heads.” I need hardly remark, however, that the higher the external meatus of the ear, the less will be the facial angle; so that M. De Malle’s two observations manifestly contradict each other.