Abstract
THIS subject has been of much interest to me, and otologists as well as evolutionists must feel indebted to your contributor in NATURE of December 13, Mr. Lawson Tail, for his efforts to determine the cause. May I be permitted, however, from an otologist's point of view, to draw attention to a possible source of error in conducting researches of this kind when deductions are made, as they were in this instance, from acoustic experiments mainly? I allude to Mr. Tail's method of determining the hearing power of the animal experimented on, namely, his cat, “Old Pudge,” and the conclusions that he has drawn from the results obtained; thus he infers that purely “tympanic” deafness, consisting in an entire failure of the transmitting mechanism of the middle ear to respond to aërial undulations of sound, existed in the case of “Old Pudge,” because the concussion produced by stamping on the floor could be heard by that animal, whilst the voice was not heard. Abnormal hearing of this kind, I am convinced, by no means establishes the fact that inner ear trouble does not exist, since such deaf-mutes as are believed to be defective in this regard are very sensitive to grave or deep tones—thunder, for example, being painful even to them. Pudge's cochlear (inner ear) functions were believed to be serviceable, inasmuch as he could use his voice; but such evidence cannot be accepted as conclusive, for absolutely deaf persons, who have been deprived of both “tympanic“ and “cochlear” functions, are yet capable of making noises, and often of learning to speak after a fashion. Another point is also of interest in this connection: the ears of Pudge, it is said, were found to be normal in every respect, both as to their transmitting and perceptive functions, with the exception of the absence of a triangular gap from either tympanic membrane. In reference to this it may he said, in the first place, that it is difficult to understand how the delicate mucous membrane lining the tympanum retained, its “normal” condition under such exposure; and, in the second place, these defects could scarcely be the cause of absolute deafness, since it is a well-known fact that quite good hearing often remains in the human subject where, from disease, much greater loss in the tympanic membrane has been sustained than was found to exist in the hearing organs of Pudge. Altogether it seems probable that in certain white cats great congenital deafness may exist, and that the animal, on finding aärial transmission of sound to be imperfect, comes finally, like man under similar circumstances, to disregard its use entirely, and place its reliance solely on sound that can be felt, as it were. Moreover, is it not probable also that the trouble, in some degree at least, may lie in the perceptive centre of the brain? It is a significant fact that in Pudge at least some disease of the nervous centres existed, since he was the subject of epileptic convulsions.
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SEXTON, S. Deafness in White Cats. Nature 29, 312 (1884). https://doi.org/10.1038/029312a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/029312a0
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