And it is specially offensive to me—it would be anyway, for my ears are not handsome; but worse still must be admitted, they are not normal. They answer every purpose of hearing and of restraining my hat from slipping down over my eyes and on my neck, which is all I have demanded of them hitherto. But now I know that as emblems of my mental and moral characteristics they are wholly remiss, even degraded. They are .079 larger than normality; they stand out from my head at an angle which exhibits 2° too much obtusity; the lobule displays .17 too little pendulosity; and, worst of all, the fossa scaphoida of my pinna is basely unconvoluted. I am sore ashamed of all this. I think of having the twin base betrayers of my degenerate nature shaved off in spots, and already I tie them close to my head at night in a feeble attempt at improvement. But I am not in my callow youth; I fear they have not been bent in the way they should be inclined, that their degeneracy is irremediable. It is not through physical stigmata alone that I find myself branded. I find that I am impulsive, I have a predilection for inane reverie, and for search for the bases of phenomena—all sad traits. Worst of all, I have “the irresistible desire of the degenerate to accumulate useless trifles.” Nordau says, “It is a stigmata of degeneration, and has had invented for it the name oniomania or buying craze. The oniomaniac is simply unable to pass by any lumber without feeling an impulse to acquire.” When I read that sentence I glanced guiltily at my cabinets of old china—well, I could use it on the table and thus make it unstigmatic; at my Dutch silver—I might melt it up and sell it; my books, my autographs, my photographs, all may find some excuse; but how can I palliate my book-plates, or ever live down having gone for a year through every village, city, and town where I chanced or sought to wander, asking at every jeweller’s, silversmith’s, and watch-repairer’s, “Have you any bridges of old verge watches?” I fear those watch-bridges stamp me an oniomaniac. And am I wholly free from Lombroso’s graphomania? Have I not an insane desire to write? I conceal my obsession, but it ever influences me. I may confess also (since I confess at all) that I have rupophobia (fear of dirt), iophobia (fear of poison), nosophobia (fear of sickness), belenophobia (fear of needles—especially on the floor), and one or two other wretched obsessions, particularly an inordinate love for animals, upon which I had hitherto rather bridled as the mark of a tender nature. But let me dwell no more on my own peculiar stigmata, but show how—to paraphrase Prior: “All earth is by the ears together Since first that horrid book come hither.”