AS TO OURSELVES 



which travel 188,000 miles a second, the 

 vibrations of sound travel only 1,100 feet 

 a second. Sounds, therefore, soon die 

 away in the distance, nor can a thousand 

 voices singing together go much farther 

 than one voice does, the same as, if instead 

 of singing the crowd were throwing stones, 

 but a few of the stones would go beyond 

 the average distance of the rest. Never- 

 theless, the ear possesses certain intrinsic 

 advantages over the eye. Instead of the 

 constantly mistaken information which 

 the eye gives, the ear is always accurate 

 and truthful. Hence it was a great ad- 

 vance in medicine to enlist its aid in aus- 

 cultation. It fails in our species only in 

 its report of the direction of sounds, be- 

 cause for that purpose we have no mov- 

 able external ears such as those of the rab- 

 bits and the equines. Unlike the eye, 

 which chiefly informs the mind, the ear 

 stirs the emotions. We can see a fish 

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