Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/197

Rh and emits a loud roar. The dropping of a sixpence into a hand already containing coin, at a distance of twenty yards, knocks the flame down. It is not possible to walk across the floor without agitating the flame. The creaking of boots sets it in violent commotion. The crumpling or tearing of paper, or the rustle of a silk dress, does the same. It is startled by the patter of a raindrop. I hold a watch near the flame; nobody hears its ticks; but you all see their effect upon the flame; at every tick it falls and roars. The winding-up of the watch also produces tumult. The twittering of a distant sparrow shrieks in the flame; the note of a cricket would do the same. A chirrup from a distance of thirty yards causes it to fall and roar." In reference to the power of the flame to respond to poetry, the lecturer said: "The flame selects from the sounds those to which it can respond; it notices some by the slightest nod, to others it bows more distinctly, to some its obeisance is very profound, while to many sounds it turns an entirely deaf ear."

So long as the cause of any unusual sound is unexplained to the non-scientific listener, he is apt, naturally enough, to term that sound mysterious; but the element of mystery will disappear when he is assured that sounds of every description are due to natural and unalterable acoustic principles.

 

of the innumerable characteristics of women which cause the "inextinguishable laughter" of men is the habit cherished by many of underscoring their words; writing in italics for the better direction of the reader, and the more distinct emphasizing of the sense. Like many other things, the value or worthlessness of this habit depends solely on its use or abuse. Judiciously employed, those passages underlined, those words in italics, are excellent finger-posts to the mind; but when finger-posts are put up at every field-gate and foot-wide bridle-path, the attention gets chopped up into unmeaning fragments, and the sense is lost by subdivision. With some people, however, the habit is inveterate. We have seen letters in which every line was dashed as regularly as the t's were crossed and the i's dotted. Sometimes the dashes were doubled, and not always in the right place: as, Will you to tea to-night? or, We  you yesterday very much; Our music  good  the singing Excellent; and so on. Editors know the kind of thing only too well from the amateur contributors who overwhelm them with their attentions. Were they to print as their untechnical correspondents write, their pages would be typographical harlequins—shape standing for colour. Italics for all the adjectives and adverbs; small capitals to all the nouns; inverted commas bracketing each well-known phrase and commonplace quotation; notes of exclamation standing sentinel at the end of every sentence; unmeaning dashes carrying the mind into the vast and vague—this is the kind of thing by which amateur writers would, if they were followed, break up the decent uniformity of bourgeois and small pica. We question, however, if the public would like the change, and we are sure that the printers would not; and even the writers themselves would feel a little surprise, if nothing more, when they saw their method translated into type, and learnt practically the need of level handwriting and a more sparing use of what we may call caligraphic expletives. A century ago, and less, italics and capitals were employed much more freely than now; as is still the case with the Germans, every noun was headed with its distinctive letter in large, while the accent was laid by means of the italicized running hand, which showed the reader what he was expected to note; but the emphasis given by both is often poor and misplaced, and the result is one of forcible feebleness and empty pomposity rather than anything else.

It is the same with certain speakers. They emphasize their words as if each began with a capital, or was to be writtenwritten [sic] in italics; and their voices inflect the inverted commas and notes of admiration which, writing, they would have marked down with a broad pen and in the blackest ink. If they tell you that they have just come in from a drive in the Park where they saw the chestnut team, they speak with as much emphasis as if they were acting in a melodrama at the moment of supreme danger, or, if in graver style, as if they were relating the deliberations of a Cabinet council, dealing with the fall of empires and the creation of future history. When they shake hands with you and inquire after your health, which is in the most uninteresting condition of flawless perfection, they wring your hand for the first part till you can hardly repress your groans, and for the second they throw