THE TELEPHONE. 751 



Indeed, the microphone seems to open up several new lines of research. 

 We shall have London physicians performing stethoscopic auscultations on patients 

 in all parts of the kingdom. The Entomological Society have been much interested 

 by Mr Wood-Mason's discovery of a stridulating apparatus in scorpions. Perhaps 

 ere long a microphone, placed in a nest of tropical scorpions, may be connected 

 up to a receiver in the apartments of the society, so as to give the members 

 and their musical friends an opportunity of deciding whether the musical taste 

 of the scorpion resembles that of the nightingale or that of the cat. 



I have said that the telephone is an instance of the benefit to be derived 

 from the cross-fertilization of the sciences. Now this is an operation which 

 cannot be performed by merely collecting treatises on the different sciences, and 

 binding them up into an encyclopaedia. Science exists only in the mind, and 

 the union of the sciences can take place only in a living person. 



Now, Prof. Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, is not an electrician 

 who has found out how to make a tin plate speak, but a speaker, who, to 

 gain his private ends, has become an electrician. He is the son of a very 

 remarkable man, Alexander Melville Bell, author of a book called "Visible 

 Speech," and of other works relating to pronunciation. In fact, his whole life 

 has been employed in teaching people to speak. He brought the art to such 

 perfection that, though a Scotchman, he taught himself in six months to speak 

 English, and I regret extremely that when I had the opportunity in Edinburgh 

 I did not take lessons from him. Mr Melville Bell has made a complete 

 analysis and classification of all the sounds capable of being uttered by the 

 human voice, from the Zulu clicks to coughing and sneezing; and he has 

 embodied his results in a system of symbols, the elements of which are not 

 taken from any existing alphabet, but are founded on the different configurations 

 of the organs of speech. 



The capacities of this new mode of representing speech have been put to 

 the test by Mr Alexander J. Ellis, author of "The Essentials of Phonetics," 

 a gentleman who has studied the whole theory of speech acoustically, philologically, 

 and historically. He describes the result in a letter to The Reader: 



" The mode of procedure was as follows : Mr Bell sent his two sons, who 

 were to read the writing, out of the room it is interesting to know that the 

 elder, who read all the words in this case, had only had five weeks' instruction 

 in the use of the alphabet and I dictated slowly and distinctly the sounds which 

 I wished to be written. They consisted of a few words in Latin, pronounced 



