SPEECH AND SONG. m 



and of larger chest-girth than onr predecessors even of a not very- 

 remote date ; it is reasonable, therefore, to suppose that the aver- 

 age lungs and larynx are bigger nowadays, and the air-blast from 

 the lungs stronger. This would appear to justify us in believing 

 that the voice is stronger than it was even two or three centuries 

 ago. There are, however, no facts that I know of to prove it. 



Of the ethnology of the voice little or nothing is certainly 

 known. Almost the only facts I know of coming under this head 

 are (1) the superior sonorousness of the Italian voice, and (2) the 

 want of resonance in the voices of some Australian aborigines, 

 which is supposed to be due to the extreme smallness of the hollow 

 spaces in the skull which serve as resonance chambers. Yet there 

 is an infinite diversity in the voices of different nations, arising 

 from difference of physical conformation, habit of speech, climate, 

 etc. It is to our climate that Milton attributed the fact, which 

 strikes all foreigners, that English people speak with the mouth 

 half shut. " For we Englishmen," he says, " being far northerly, 

 do not open our mouths in the cold air wide enough to grace a 

 southern tongue, but are observed by all other nations to speak 

 exceeding close and inward ; so that to smatter Latin with an 

 English mouth is as ill a hearing as law French." Then look at our 

 American cousins, in whom it is not the mouth but the nose that 

 is the " peccant part " is it climate or variation of structure that 

 has wrought the change in their original English speech ; or is it 

 simply a twang inherited from their Puritan ancestors, who took 

 their " cant " with them to the New World ? Americans, including 

 even so refined a scholar as Mr. Lowell, boast that they alone keep 

 the true tradition of English speech ; but I can not believe that 

 our forefathers, " in the spacious times of great Elizabeth," spoke 

 in the accents of Hosea Biglow. The difficulty, or rather impossi- 

 bility, of studying the variations of the voice under culture has 

 been due to the want of any means of permanently recording its 

 tones. Now, however, that the phonograph has emerged from 

 the condition of a scientific toy, comparative phonology may, per- 

 haps, take its place among the sciences. Besides this and other 

 results, Mr. Edison's wonderful instrument will preserve the fame 

 of orators, actors, and singers hitherto the most evanescent kind 

 of glory, as it had to be taken altogether on trust in a form as 

 concrete as a picture or a poem. The little revolving cylinders 

 will reproduce " the sound of a voice that is still," and will enable 

 us to have " the little voice set lisping once again " years after our 

 darling has been laid in an untimely grave. There seems to be 

 something almost uncanny in the power of thus permanently en- 

 shrining the most fleeting part of man, and reawakening at will 

 the living accents of one who, being dead, yet speaketh to the 

 bodily ear. Contemporary Review. 



