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By Professor SILVANUS P. THOMPSON. 
OUPt days after the foundation of the Bristol Naturalists’ 
Society, that is to say, on the 12th of May, 1862, there 
was met together in a fine old hall in the City of Frankfort-on- 
the-Main a crowded audience, eager to see and hear the latest 
scientific invention expounded by its inventor. The occasion 
was the meeting of the Free German Institute (Freies Deutsches 
Hochstift), a sort of Literary and Philosophical Society, which 
has since domiciled itself in the historical old house where 
Goethe was born. The invention which attracted so notable a 
crowd was the Telephone. The inventor was Philipp Keis, a 
teacher of natural sciences in Garnier’s Institute, a flourishing 
boys’ school at Friedrichsdorf, near Homburg, 
On one occasion previously had the Telephone been publicly 
exhibited ; namely, at a meeting of the Physical Society of 
Frankfort, on the 22nd of October in the preceding year. 
In the Journal of the Frankfort Society (Jahresbericht des 
Physikalischen Vereins zu Frankfurt am Main) for 1860-61, 
p. 57, may be found the memoir of Philipp Reis on the subject, 
under the title “On Telephony by the Galvanic Current.” In 
this memoir, which show's a marvellous precision and a grasp of 
the subject that excites admiration and wonder, the author says: 
“ I have now succeeded in constructing an apparatus by means 
of which I am in a position to re-produce the tones of divers 
instruments, and even to a certain degree the human voice.” 
The inventor further says:-— Since the length of the conducting 
