210 LETTERS ON NATUEAL MAGIC. 



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 company, M. Kempelen caused 

 the machine to pronounce it, by introducing his 

 hands beneath the cloth, and apparently 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. Kratzenstein seems to have been equally 

 unsuccessful ; 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 accom- 

 plished 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 experi- 

 ment, shown in Fig. 49, he used a shallower 

 cavity, such as that in Fig. 50, and found that 

 he could entirely dispense with the introduction 

 of the hand, and could obtain the whole series of 



