236 LE1TERS ON NATURAL MAGIC. 



The explanation suggested by Sir A. Smith 

 had been previously given in a more specific 

 form by M. Dussaulx, the translator of Juvenal. 

 " The statue," says he, " being hollow, the heat 

 of the sun heated the air which it contained, and 

 this air, issuing at some crevice, produced the 

 sounds of which the priests gave their own inter- 

 pretation." 



Rejecting this explanation, M. Langles, in his 

 dissertation on the vocal statue of Memnon, and 

 M. Salverte, in his work on the occult sciences, 

 have ascribed the sounds entirely to Egyptian 

 priestcraft; and have even gone so far as to 

 describe the mechanism by which the statue not 

 only emitted sounds, but articulated distinctly 

 the intonations appropriate to the seven Egyptian 

 vowels, and consecrated to the seven planets. 

 M. Langles conceives that the sounds may be 

 produced by a series of hammers, which strike 

 either the granite itself, or sonorous stones like 

 those which have been long used in China for 

 musical instruments. M. Salverte improves this 

 imperfect apparatus, by supposing that there 

 might be adapted to these hammers a clepsydra, 

 or water-clock, or any other instrument fitted to 

 measure time, and so constructed as to put the 

 hammers in motion at sunrise. Not satisfied 

 with this supposition, he conjectures that the 

 spring of all this mechanism was to be found in 

 the art of concentrating the rays of the sun, 

 which was well known to the ancients. Between 

 the lips of the statue, or in some less remarkable 

 part of it concealed from view by its height, he 

 conceives an aperture to be perforated, contain- 

 ing a lens or a mirror capable of condensing the 



