EARS.

(Men who moved them.)

It is pretended that Hercules could move his ears, which phenomenon is very rare. The journal of the Academiœ Naturae curiosorum speaks of a maid who

moved her ears. The author of the News from the Republic of Letters, giving an extract of this journal, observed that there was not reason to doubt of this particular, after what the abbot de Marolles attests of the philosopher Crassot, in the thirty-second page of his Memoirs. “He had a great resemblance,” says he, “to those pictures of the Cynic philosophers, which are to be found in the cabinets of the curious, being slovenly like them, with a long and bushy beard, and hair ill combed. He had one thing very particular, and which I never observed in any one else, which was, that he could move his ears backwards and forwards when he would, without touching them.” Peter Messie relates, in the twenty-fourth chapter of his first part, that St Austin saw a man, who not only moved his ears as he pleased, but also his hair, without any motion of his hands or head. Give me leave to add some other passages relating to this. I begin with a pretty long one of Casaubon. “This is quite contrary to the common nature of men, to whom alone of all animals (unless we should except apes) God has given ears which have no self motion. (For what Martial writes of the son of one Cinna, who had long ears, which moved like those of asses, is undoubtedly rather a poetical invention than a true story). However Eustathius tells us of a certain priest who moved his ears. I have been informed likewise by men worthy of credit, that the ears of a certain learned man were plainly seen to move, when, passing through the confines of Savoy, he understood that he was in hazard of being burnt alive by the magistrates, upon a report that he was then flying from Toulouse into Italy, on account of his having been guilty of a heinous sin.” Since Casaubon doth not doubt of the truth of Eustathius’s report, nor of what was told him of the learned man that escaped from Toulouse, why doth he doubt of the story of Cinna’s child, in the thirty-ninth epigram of the sixth book of Martial? He would have less doubted of it, if he had taken notice of what St. Austin says in the twenty-fourth chapter of the fourteenth book, De Civitate Dei: “sunt qui et aures moveant vel singulas vel ambas simul.—There are some people who move their ears, either singly, or both together but also of what Vesalius attests. That great anatomist affirms that he saw at Padua, two men whose ears moved. He elsewhere explains the cause of this motion. “Interdum,” says he, “quibusdam raris fibris carnalis membrana quam carnosam vocamus super aures augetur, et modice auri proximam cutem et ipsam quoque aurem motu agit arbitrario.— Sometimes, by means of certain delicate fibres, the fleshy membrane, which we call the carnosa, is enlarged above the ears, and gives a gentle arbitrary motion to the skin next to the ear, and even to the ear itself.” Du Laurent affirms that he has seen people that caused their ears to move. Valverdus saw the same thing in a Spaniard at Rome. Procopius compares Justinian to an ass, not only because of his dullness and stupidity, but also with respect to bis moveable ears, which occasioned his being called in a full theatre γαύδανε, (which is to say, word for word, Mr Ass) by those of the green faction, or the Prasini, which he was an enemy to. I have read these words in La Mothe le Vayer, who cites the 36th page of Procopius’s Secret History.—Art. Hercules.