Tae nineteenth century gives promise of being remarkable in the annals of the world, not only for the scientific value of the many inventions which have recently been made, but also for their exceeding beauty. The telephone offers us a fair prospect of being able to bear the voices of our friends and the strains of music at a distance of a thousand miles; the phonograph, when perfected, will preserve for us, mirable dictu! the actual words of speakers long dead and gone, the very performances, both vocal and instrumental, of our most eminent professors of song and harmony. The stores of delight and usefulness which may thus be laid up for the benefit of future generations have already been pointed out by all our journalists at home. The Parliamentary orator of the year 1900 may possibly be heard by the more advanced statesmen of the year 2000; the last utterances of dying men may be reproduced as evidence in criminal and civil Courts 'a' decade or @ century after their demise; the familiar tones of departed friends may be heard over and over again by their survivors, long after the once-animated body has been Inia to rest beneath the churchyard yews, where The fibres net the dreamless head, The route are wrapped about the bones, Strange and wonderfal, however, as all this may be, fresh: wonder has just burst upon the world, completing and supplementing the previous discoveries.
must have been patent to all who have themselves tested the powers of the two lustraments just named, that, when reduced to practice, they are still far from perfect. In using the telephone, for instance, there is required no small art in hearing. The mental powers must be rigorously concentrated, so to speak, upon the ear which is placed against the tube; the other ear must be as rigorously shut against all disturbing sounds. Even than, the transmitted sounds are often difficult to catch, and the articulation strikes the tympanum with a blarted and confused effect, which somewhat disappoints the investigator during the first few trials that he makes. But now we are informed of & new and still more ingenious instrament, which bids fair to solve all the difficulties of using the former two. It is the province of the Microphone to magnity the smallest sounds in nature or in art, in precisely the same way as the microscope enlarges the tiniest particles of matter to the eye; an effect which is produced by interposing a sort of filter composed of charcoal permeated by atoms of' fine mercury, between the sound-emitting substance and the ear, Simple as the contrivance is, its issues promise to be marvellous in the extreme, and of inestimable value to the world in nearly all partments of natural and mechanical science. Those whose sense of hearing impaired, will be able to provide emselyes with ear-trompets fitted up with sound-magnifying apparatus all complete, The surgeon will be able to gauge the exact amount of labour and difficulty incident to a diseased heart, the precise amount of decay in the lungs of consump. tive patients, and the very speed with which the blood courses through the veins and arteries. Indeed, if we may pin our faith to a writer in the Spectator, whence we derive several of the suggestions offered in the present article, there is hardly a sound in Nature that will not be clearly distinguishable by the aid of this magical appliance, According to this authority, we shall even hear those workings in the vegetable kingdom which have hitherto been justly regarded as a synonym for silent activity. Probably we shall never be able to detect a flower in the very act of opening, or a tree in the very act of growing. But we are now assured that, in future, we may listen to the sap rising through the stem and branches of an oak; that we may not only, like Ariel, "Iurk where the bee sucks," but hear the very sound it makes in sucking; that the throbbing of the air upon a leaf, the dis-filiation of the dew upon the grass, and the passage of rain-clouds through the silent atmosphere, will all be rendered appreciable to our sense of hearing by this new process of magnifying the sounds of each. Nor is this all; we shall, in a certain and very important sense, be enabled to hear light. The ripple of the sun-rays, the flow of the moonbeams, and the sparkle of the stars will be subjected to an operation analogous to the function of the spectroscope, only the spectrum will form s musical rain. bow, not a coloured one. It is expected that by this intensifying of the tiny thrummings made by the waves of light as they strike the air, a new and easy method: will have been discovered of analysing the light of different stars; that, just as we have already arrived at an exact knowledge of what metals are burning in the sun, through the spectroscopical analysis, so we shall be able to verify our theories by testing the sconstic properties of each ray, and probably make fresh discoveries by the same process. We shall be thus enabled to discriminate between the light emitted from different heavenly bodies, and weigh the influence of each "pencil" as it pierces through the air; proving as we do so the object reality of the ancient "music of the spheres," and blending the rich colours of the prism into a chord of Folian harmony. The phenomena: of light and sound will be thus proved to interpenetrate and interlace each other, and another and most beautiful step will have been taken in the great task of unravelling the mysteries of matter.
It is however from the application of the Microphone to the other recent discoveries in acoustic science, that the most practical benefits will result, The telephone now reproduces a shout from the far end as an indistinct whisper to the listener; but by the addition of the microphonic principle a whisper in England might be made to sound like shout in France. The innumerable advantages accruing to a power such as this are too obvious to call for any enlargement from us, and we should only tax our readers' patience by ate tempting it. We will do no more than add, that such of our readers as are interested in the subject from a scientific point of view, and require more informa. tion respecting the close analogy which exists between light and sound, cannot do better than refer toa fascinating article on the "Relations of Radiant Heat to Chemical Constitution, Colour, and Texture," published in the Fort nightly Review for February, 1866, from the pen of Professor Tyndall. Fust a the sensation of sound is pro duced by the agitation of the auditory nerve, the result of aerial vibrations, so is the sensation of light due toa similar agitation of the optic nerve, the phenomenon in this instance also being a product of wave-motion. The throbbings of sound can be felt by other nerves than those of the ear, particularly in the case of those persons whose bearing is impaired; while, on the other band, an atom, sending its light-producing pulsations. through
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.