100 YEARS AGO

A simple workable, absolutely trustworthy system is still urgently wanted for the detection of criminals, and if the authoress of this book has succeeded she certainly deserves the thanks of all the Governments of Europe. . . It so happened that about seven years ago the reviewer came to the conclusion that the external ear ought to yield some clue to the relationship of man and ape, and of one race of man to another. . . To test the “criminal-mark” theory of Lombroso and many others, he examined the ears of more than 800 confirmed criminals, and of more than two thousand inmates of asylums for the insane, situated in parts of the country where he had already examined the ears of the sane. Altogether the ears of more than 40,000 people of different races and of different moralities, besides those of about 300 apes and anthropoids, were examined, but the total results of this elaborate investigation were almost entirely of a negative nature. . . If the reviewer's methods and observations are correct, the confirmed criminal's ear is the ear of the average inhabitant of Great Britain. Nor did the ears of the insane differ, on an average, from those of the people from which they were drawn, and if the authoress had carried her observations over a number of men of genius or of high ability, instead of drawing elaborate deductions from single observations, she would probably have arrived at a similar conclusion as to them.

From Nature 21 February 1901.

50 YEARS AGO

Miss Dorothea M. A. Bate, who died after a brief illness on January 13 at the age of seventy-two, was for more than fifty years one of the outstanding personalities at the British Museum (Natural History). When only seventeen, and with neither qualification nor encouragement, she started work in the Bird Room as a voluntary worker; but her interests lay chiefly in palaeontology in relation to the Recent fauna, rather than in the Recent fauna itself. . . During 1901–1902 Miss Bate explored the caves of Cyprus and made some notable discoveries, such as the remains of pigmy elephants, and soon extended her interest to cave deposits in Crete, the Balearic—where she discovered the unique 'antelope' Myotragus—Malta and Sardinia, working meticulously and earnestly and always alone.

From Nature 24 February 1951.