Even non-scientific observers have noted the frequency among criminals of
projecting or of long and voluminous ears. In the answers to my Questions
issued to medical officers of prisons I found that the prominent ears of
criminals were more generally recognised than any other abnormality. Thus
Dr. V. Clarke says--“The largely developed external ear is a common
feature;” others speak of “ears often large and outstanding,” etc.
Lombroso finds the ear _ad ansa_, as he calls it--the handle-shaped
ear--in 28 per cent. of his criminals; Knecht in 22 per cent.; Marro not
more frequently than among ordinary people. Ottolenghi, who has recently
examined the ears of nearly 600 criminals and of 200 normal persons, finds
that while among the latter it is found in 20 per cent., among the former
it is found in 39 per cent., the percentage varying from 35 among thieves
to 42 among those convicted of assault and wounding. This observation is
indeed by no means of recent date. In reading lately that curious treatise
of mediæval physiology, Michael Scott’s _De Secretis Naturæ_, I found that
a very bad character is given to those persons whose ears are uncommonly
long, or ample transversely; they are bold, vain, foolish, incapable of
work. To come down to comparatively recent times, Grohmann in 1820 noted
the prominent ear as a marked characteristic of the criminal. Morel
studied the abnormalities of the ear, especially in relation to heredity;
Foville, as Dr. Barnes informs me, was accustomed to point out their
significance in the insane; and in England Laycock fully appreciated their
value as indications of degeneration.[21] Dr. Langdon Down, working on the
same lines as Laycock, points out in _Mental Diseases of Childhood_ the
frequency of congenital ear deformities in idiots and the feeble-minded,
associated often with webbed toes and fingers; also an implantation of the
ears farther back than is normal, giving an exaggerated facial
development. In France, Italy, and Germany there has within the last two
or three years sprung up a considerable literature on the subject, of
which Frigerio’s little book, _L’Oreille Externe: Étude d’Anthropologie
Criminelle_ (Paris, 1888), is perhaps the most valuable. Dr. Frigerio, who
has devoted special attention to this feature both among criminals and the
insane, finds certain peculiarities very common, and also notes various
anomalies of movement in the pinna and its partial hyperæmia, especially
in neurotic subjects. From the examination of several hundred subjects, he
concludes that the auriculo-temporal angle (measured by a special otometer
from the edge of the pinna to the mastoid) undergoes a gradual progression
from below 90° in the normal person, above 90° among criminals and the
insane, up to above 100° among apes. He found the large angle very marked
in homicides; less so in thieves. The longest ear Frigerio has ever seen
in man or woman was in a woman convicted of complicity in the murder of
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