Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/121

Rh and of larger chest-girth than our predecessors even of a not very remote date; it is reasonable, therefore, to suppose that the average lungs and larynx are bigger nowadays, and the air-blast from the lungs stronger. This would appear to justify us in believing that the voice is stronger than it was even two or three centuries ago. There are, however, no facts that I know of to prove it.

Of the ethnology of the voice little or nothing is certainly known. Almost the only facts I know of coming under this head are—(1) the superior sonorousness of the Italian voice, and (2) the want of resonance in the voices of some Australian aborigines, which is supposed to be due to the extreme smallness of the hollow spaces in the skull which serve as resonance chambers. Yet there is an infinite diversity in the voices of different nations, arising from difference of physical conformation, habit of speech, climate, etc. It is to our climate that Milton attributed the fact, which strikes all foreigners, that English people speak with the mouth half shut. "For we Englishmen," he says, "being far northerly, do not open our mouths in the cold air wide enough to grace a southern tongue, but are observed by all other nations to speak exceeding close and inward; so that to smatter Latin with an English mouth is as ill a hearing as law French." Then look at our American cousins, in whom it is not the mouth but the nose that is the "peccant part"—is it climate or variation of structure that has wrought the change in their original English speech; or is it simply a twang inherited from their Puritan ancestors, who took their "cant" with them to the New World? Americans, including even so refined a scholar as Mr. Lowell, boast that they alone keep the true tradition of English speech; but I can not believe that our forefathers, "in the spacious times of great Elizabeth," spoke in the accents of Hosea Biglow. The difficulty, or rather impossibility, of studying the variations of the voice under culture has been due to the want of any means of permanently recording its tones. Now, however, that the phonograph has emerged from the condition of a scientific toy, comparative phonology may, perhaps, take its place among the sciences. Besides this and other results, Mr. Edison's wonderful instrument will preserve the fame of orators, actors, and singers—hitherto the most evanescent kind of glory, as it had to be taken altogether on trust—in a form as concrete as a picture or a poem. The little revolving cylinders will reproduce "the sound of a voice that is still," and will enable us to have "the little voice set lisping once again" years after our darling has been laid in an untimely grave. There seems to be something almost uncanny in the power of thus permanently enshrining the most fleeting part of man, and reawakening at will the living accents of one who, being dead, yet speaketh to the bodily ear.—Contemporary Review.