West Virginia Democrat

ALL ABOUT EARS.
Points About Them With Which Every
One is Not Acquainted.

Baltimore Sun.

A writer in Harper's Bazar says:

"A curious proposition has been made by the chief of police of one of the large European cities, that photographs of criminals should be taken, not with the full face, as now, but with the side face in view, using the ear especially, other features changing with the course of time—a mouth falling, an eye sinking, a nose projecting, a brow growing prominent, a cheek either baggy or hollow, a chin either pointed or doubling—but an ear always remaining unchanged into old age, and no two ears being alike; so that a thief would be known by his ear as long as there was anything left of him."

"This would seem to involve a singular error on the part of those who follow such hasty advice. No organ, any close observer will declare, changes shape more than the ear does. Even the piercing of the lobe for ear rings will often pull it down and inflate it so as to work complete transformation there; and anybody who has a gouty acquaintance may see the change wrought in the ears by the chalky lumps and concretions under the skin that never fail to show themselves there, that sometimes attain the size of the curious little notch seen in the upper edge of many ears, and said by those who have faith in the intricacies of evolution to be the remnant of the ancestral ear of the last apish progenitor.

"Few features of the human body are more distinctly beautiful than the ear, when it is a beautiful ear; that is to say, when it is rosy and little, and so thin that the blood glows behind it like a flame. No sea shell with its myriad delicate whorls, with its pink and white, with its polish and brittle daintiness, is half so lovely, for no sea shell, after all, is alive when we see it, or when it has reached that stage of beauty. But the ear in its perfection has the white throat beneath it, the clustering hair above it, the damask cheek beside it, and is set off and heightened in every line and tint by its surroundings, and as often as not has the eye of the beholder fastened to it on the point of a quivering jewel glittering in it. Yet, let the ear be ever so small and curly—a bit of transparency in the young girl—hers will be a very exceptional case, if, when she has attained the age that makes caps advisable, she is not glad of the cap to hide a large flat piece of cartilage on either side of head—not the least disagreeable of the disagreeable things that have come to her as warnings and evidences of the end of all things. This is not the case with every person, of course; enough people to prove the rule retain a sufficient shape to the ear into old age; but by far the greater number of ears cease to be objects on which the eye of another cares to linger, and become objects which make every contemporary put up a hand to see if his own ears have turned into flaps of elephantine proportions. As life goes on, every year uncurls and straightens out the pretty whorls of most ears, and flattens, and flattens and seems to enlarge, the upper and outer edge, perhaps not through growth, nor even the daily wiping of the part, so much as through the loss of fat in the tissues and the falling away of neighboring roundness and plumpness; the one rendering the cartilage smooth, the other making it seem larger than it is by comparison. In either event, the ear of the criminal of to-day will hardly be the same ear to appearance ten years from to-day—will be a very different ear in twenty years. The ears of elderly persons tell the sad tale to any who care to scrutinize them in sufficient number to generalize from what is seen, and any one who chooses may regretfully watch the process as time passes, which transforms one of the choicest features of physical charm into one of the ugliest."