Copy 1

A treatise on the structure, economy, and diseases of the ear; being the essay for which the Fothergillian Gold Medal was awarded by the Medical Society of London / By George Pilcher.

  • Pilcher, George, 1801-1855.
Date:
1838
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A treatise on the structure, economy, and diseases of the ear; being the essay for which the Fothergillian Gold Medal was awarded by the Medical Society of London / By George Pilcher. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tion of its nerve connected with the brain still enjoy- ing its function, may receive the impressions above noticed, and convey them to the sensorium. Thus it becomes possible that every animal, however low in the scale of creation, may possess a sense of feeling excited by the vibrations of the fluid or air in which it lives, analogous to true audition. De Blainville describes Hearing as_ necessarily connected with voice and speech, and, therefore, as partaking more of the animal character than the other senses,—a theory which is doubtless correct when applied to the higher classes; but, as the Ear is found in some articulata, and im all fishes, which, wanting lungs, cannot be supposed to possess voice, it 1s certain that this sense must exist for other pur- poses than mental communication; as for example, to warn the individual of the approach of danger, or of its prey, and in an especial manner, probably, to facilitate the approximation of the sexes, a surmise, which is corroborated by the fact, that Hearing is absent in those species in which the sexual organs are united in the same individual. SECTION II. De Blainville, who has probably given to the scien- tific world the most accurate and simple history of the comparative anatomy of the Kar, has made four divisions of this apparatus. Ist. The essential or fundamental portion — the Vestibule ;