LOOK AT HIS EARS!

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 261, 3 November 1928, Page 7 (Supplement)

LOOK AT HIS EARS!

CRIMINAL CHARACTERISTICS. H. Ashton Wolfe, assistant investigator at the Marseilles Scientific Police Laboratory, has an interesting article in a recent "Illustrated London News" on the Facial Characteristics of the Criminal, in which he destroys many of our illusions. "The layman," he writes, "when he wishes to exercise his powers of observation, is influenced by the popular fallacy that a thin-lipped mouth inevitably denotes cruelty; that the eyes of a criminal must be too widely apart or abnormally close together; or that a retreating chin is a sure sign of degeneracy. In reality, the worst offenders in the police archives have fleshy lips, medium chins and eyes set in a normal position. The one organ which truly reveals primitive instincts is the ear. All our other features are influenced from childhood by the life we lead. Mouth, eyes and facial muscles constantly play their parts whilst we work or talk. The ear alone remains unchanged, since we have long ago lost the power to move it; and because it is complex in shape its imperfect formation clearly denotes an arrest or warp in the development of the unborn child and points to hereditary depravity, abnormal tendencies and perverted moral and physical instincts. The visible parts of the human ear should be harmoniously proportioned in the normal human being. In the degenerate they are either undeveloped or quite rudimentary. The ears of the habitual criminal are either lumpy and shapeless, unnaturallv flat and broad, pointed at the apex like an animal's, or deficient in lobe and helix. A common characteristic is also a strikingly exaggerated lobe.