From James Paget 17 January 1873
1, Harewood Place, | Hanover Square. | W.
Jany. 17. 1873.
My dear Darwin
It is so great a pleasure to collect facts for you that you must excuse my sometimes sending what may be very useless— The enclosed is a rough sketch of an ear I saw two days ago— The gentleman is a Northern German, and, judging from his features, a Jew—(name Strauss) 51 years old— He has abundant very black scalp-hair,—about an average quantity of dark short hair on his arms and (he told me) on his trunk & lower limbs— His peculiarity was in the tufts of hair on his ears. He had about the average quantity at the very orifice of the meatus: and three remarkable tufts or clusters at the places indicated in the sketch,—tufts of black, stiffish hairs from an inch to an inch in length— I have never seen this arrangement before, and think I can be sure that it is very rare— The gentleman was not aware of any similar growth of hair in other members of his family; but I could not cross-examine him for he seemed to discern that my questions tended monkey-wards1
There was no growth of hair on the other surface of the ear— The upper and the posterior tufts grew below & within the border of the helix: the middle and anterior tuft from the outer border of the curved between the tragus & antitragus— The general form of the ear was not remarkable: but it had no small lobe descending from the upper border of the helix.
Always sincerely your’s | James Paget.
Charles Darwin Esq
[Enclosure]
CD annotations
Footnotes
Bibliography
Descent: The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. By Charles Darwin. 2 vols. London: John Murray. 1871.
Summary
Describes a patient’s ears with peculiar tufts of hair in places where he has never seen them before. Encloses sketch.
Letter details
- Letter no.
- DCP-LETT-8739
- From
- James Paget, 1st baronet
- To
- Charles Robert Darwin
- Sent from
- London, Harewood Place, 1
- Source of text
- DAR 87: 56–8
- Physical description
- ALS 3pp sketch
Please cite as
Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 8739,” accessed on 23 April 2024, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-8739.xml
Also published in The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. 21