270 LETTERS ON NATURAL MAGIC. 



There seems to be no doubt that he at last was able to 

 produce entire words and sentences, such as opera, 

 astronomy, Constantinopolis, vous etes mon ami, je vous aime 

 de tout mon cceur, venez avec moi a Paris, Leopoldus secundus, 

 Homanorum imperator semper Augustus, &c., but he never 

 fitted up a speaking figure, and probably, from being 

 dissatisfied with the general result of his labours, he 

 exhibited only to his private friends the effects of the 

 apparatus, which was fitted up in the form of a box. 



This box was rectangular, and about three feet long, 

 and was placed upon a table and covered with a cloth. 

 When any particular word was mentioned by the com- 

 pany, M. Kempelen caused the machine to pronounce 

 it, by introducing his hands beneath the cloth, and appa- 

 rently giving motion to some parts of the apparatus. Mr. 

 Thomas Collinson, who had seen this machine in London, 

 mentions in a letter to Dr. Hutton, that he afterwards saw 

 it at M. Kempelen's own house in Vienna, and that he 

 then gave it the same word to be pronounced which he 

 gave it in London, viz., the word Exploitation, which, he 

 assures us, it again distinctly pronounced with the French 

 accent. 



M. Kratzen stein seems to have been equally unsuccess- 

 ful, for though he assured M. De Lalande, when he saw 

 him in Paris in 1786, that he had made a machine which 

 could speak pretty well, and though he showed him some 

 of the apparatus by which it could sound the vowels, and 

 even such syllables as papa and mama, yet there is no 

 reason to believe that he had accomplished more than 

 this. 



The labours of Kratzenstein and Kempelen have been 

 recently pursued with great success by our ingenious 

 countryman Mr. Willis of Cambridge. In repeating 

 Kempelen's experiment shown in Fig. 48, he used a 

 shallower cavity, such as that in Fig. 49, and found that 



