10S THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



only by experience ; the voice must be, as it were, tuned to it. It 

 is well if this experience can be gained by the orator before he 

 faces his audience ; but he must remember that trying his voice in 

 an empty room is an altogether different thing from actually using 

 it in the same place packed with a solid mass of wheezing, cough- 

 ing, and perspiring humanity. Handel is said to have comforted 

 himself, when one of his oratorios had been performed to empty 

 benches, by the reflection that " it made ze moosic shound all ze 

 better," but this consolation is denied to the orator. There are 

 some buildings which are so utterly bad from the acoustic point 

 of view that even experienced speakers are little better off than 

 novices. The House of Lords has, or used to have, an unenviable 

 reputation in this respect. A story is told of the late Lord Lyttel- 

 ton that, after exhausting his voice in vain efforts to make his 

 brother peers hear a motion which he wished to propose, he in 

 despair wrote it down and asked the clerk at the table to read it 

 out. That functionary, however, was quite unable to decipher the 

 writing, and Lord Lyttelton complained that he was cut off from 

 communication with his fellows. Science has not always been 

 successful in coping with the acoustic difficulty. In 1848 it was 

 so difficult for speakers to make themselves heard in the French 

 Chamber, that a committee, consisting of the leading scientific 

 luminaries of the day such as Arago, Babinet, Dumas (the chem- 

 ist, not the author of " The Three Musketeers "), Becquerel, Chev- 

 reul (the centenarian who died the other day), Pouillet, Regnault, 

 and Duhamel was appointed to study the case and suggest a 

 remedy. After numerous experiments they hit on a contrivance, 

 designed on the most scientific principles, which was to make the 

 orator's voice ring like a clarion to the farthest benches. The last 

 state of the speaker, however, was worse than the first ; he felt as 

 if his voice was stifled under a huge night-cap, and the highly 

 scientific sound-reflector had to be discarded as a failure. Indeed, 

 modern public buildings are so often defective in this respect that 

 I am not surprised to find M. Ch. Gamier, who designed the Grand 

 Opera in Paris, exclaiming dolefully, " The science of theatrical 

 acoustics is still in its infancy, and the result in any given case is 

 uncertain." So impressed is he with the shortcomings of modern 

 architecture as regards the conveyance of sound, that he frankly 

 confesses that, in the construction of the Opera-House, he " had 

 no guide, adopted no principle, based his design on no theory " ; 

 he simply left the acoustic properties of the building to chance. 

 The result has not been altogether satisfactory, though it has been 

 no worse than in many other buildings where the architect did 

 his best to make the acoustic conditions perfect. One of the most 

 remarkable buildings from the acoustic point of view that I have 

 ever seen is the beehive-shaped Temple in Salt Lake City. It 



