WILLIAM .s //:.]//-. A'.V, F.R.S. 205 



1 may possess some right to speak, with some chance of engaging 

 your interest. 



AVliether or not I have been in the least degree successful in 

 accomplishing this is a question which you will judge, I hope, 

 rather by my desire to discharge the duty I had undertaken than 

 by the standard furnished you by my predecessors in this place. 



THE MICROPHONE.* 



AT a discussion upon Mr. William Preece's paper on the micro- 

 phone, which took place before the Society of Telegraph Engineers 

 on Thursday last, the Duke of Argyll called attention to the 

 important part which that invention was likely to play in physio- 

 logical research. As chairman of the meeting I took occasion to 

 refer to the intimate connection between the microphone and its 

 two elder sisters, the telephone and the phonograph, in conjunction 

 with which it formed a discovery which would probably be hereafter 

 regarded as one of the greatest achievements in natural science of 

 the present century. I ventured further to draw an analogy 

 between the action of the phonograph and the action of the 

 brain in the exercise of memory, and with your permission I will 

 enlarge upon this speculation to the extent of making my reasoning 

 clear enough to submit the same to the critical test. 



All impressions received by us from without, either through the 

 tympanum of the ear, the retina of the eye, or through the 

 sensitive nerves of the skin, are, it is generally believed by 

 physiologists, communicated to corpuscular bodies in the brain, 

 which lie embedded in a grey substance, the nature and precise 

 function of which have not yet been fully explained. It would 

 appear that the corpuscular bodies in which the sensitive nerves 

 terminate are connected, through the medium of extremely delicate 

 filaments, with the nervous system of volition, the reaction of the 



* Excerpt "Nature," May 30, 1878. 



