MECHANICS OF THE INNER EAR 55 



ly lacks as yet all details, owing to the deficiency of the requisite 

 experimental data. I can only repeat here what I said in the 

 preceding paragraph. 



Before we continue this attempt at an interpretation of 

 figure 21, let us consider an imaginary case the application 

 of which to our figure will soon make 

 No indiscrimi- itself clear. Imagine that during half a 



nate counting of second a nerve end receives in regular in- 

 stimuli allowed tervals fifty stimulations, but during the 

 following half-second no stimulations at 

 all; then again for half a second fifty stimulations in regular 

 intervals, and again for half a second none ; and so on. What 

 could we hear in such a case, but a tone for half a second', 

 nothing for half a second, a tone again for half a second, noth- 

 ing again for half a second, and so on. And what tone would 

 it be? Plainly the tone which we ordinarily call 100, 

 because the frequency with which fifty stimuli are received in 

 half a second is the same as that with which one hundred are 

 received in one second. I need not waste anv effort in trying 

 to prove what is self evident, namely that it would be absurd 

 to count in a case like this simply the number of stimuli during 

 any whole second and to expect, these being fifty, that we should 

 hear the tone 50. And yet this wav of counting has been 

 actually proposed. But this proposition mav well be ignored. 

 Now let us return to the interpretation of figure 21. The 

 third section of the partition, the length of which is twenty- 

 four (191 — i67), receives stimulations in 

 What beats approximately equal intervals until about the 



do we hear? miximum twenty-three when there is no 



stimulus at all until about the maximum 

 twenty-nine. With the rough approximation here possible we 

 may say that there is no stimulus during about one-tenth of the 

 period. From our discussion in the preceding paragraph it fol- 

 lows that during about nine-tenths of the period we should 



