[A short history of hearing research. II. Renaissance]

The history of basic research on the function of the hearing organ is revisited. The present, second part of the review covers the period between the renaissance of anatomical research in the 16th century and the beginning of modern hearing research at the end of the 19th century. Andreas Vesalius gave the two ossicles malleus and incus their names. His scholar Philippus Ingrassia found 1546 the third ossicle, the stapes. The cochlea was discovered 1552 by Bartholomeus Eustachius and denoted as cochlea 1561 by Gabriel Falloppio. Thomas Willis speculated 1672 that different "tones" (species audibilis) may excite different fibres of the nervus acusticus. In collaboration with the physicist Edme Mariotte, Joseph Guichard DuVerney developed in 1683 a theory of the tonotopical organisation of the cochlea, the encoding of acoustic information by mechanical spectral analysis. The scholastic dogma of Aristotle's aer implantatus was contradicted by Domenico Cotugno as late as 1760. DuVerney's theory was, together with Georg Simon Ohm's law on the applicability of the Fourier analysis to sound waves, the basis of Hermann Helmholtz' famous theory of hearing of 1863. Due to the lack of detailed knowledge about the function of nerves, however, no clear ideas were developed about the acoustical information carried to the brain by the acoustic nerve. Also in the 19th century, Alphonso Corti discovered the organ that was named after him by Albert von Kölliker, and Flouren's experiments demonstrated the function of the vestibular organs. Furthermore, the foundations of auditory psychophysics were laid by Alfred M. Mayer and others.