CHAP. XII.] THEORY OF SOUND. 363 



He then briefly referred to Edison's loud-speaking 

 telephone, and went on to exhibit and explain the 

 microphone of Professor Hughes. 



I have said the telephone is an instance of the benefit 

 to be derived from the cross -fertilisation of the sciences. 

 . . . Professor Graham Bell ... 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 per- 

 fection 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. 1 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 cough- 

 ing 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 con- 

 figurations of the organs of speech. 



. . . Helmholtz, by a series of daring strides, has effected a 

 passage for himself over that untrodden wild between acous- 

 tics and music that Serbonian bog where whole armies of 

 scientific musicians and musical men of science have sunk 

 without filling it up. 



We may not be able even yet to plant our feet in his 

 tracks and follow him right across that would require the 

 seven league boots of the German Colossus ; but to help us in 

 Cambridge we have the Board of Musical Studies vindicating 

 for music its ancient place in a liberal education. On the 

 physical side we have Lord Eayleigh laying our foundation 

 deep and strong in his Theory of Sound. On the aesthetic 



1 Maxwell had profited not a little by his own studies in this 

 direction. But the Gallowegian tones are hard to modify, and even in 

 his verse such rhymes as " hasn't " = " pleasant" recall to those who 

 knew him his peculiar mode of speech. 



