Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/377

Rh Phonography is thus described in the April number, 1632, of the Courier Vèritable, a little monthly publication in which novel fancies were frequently aired: "Captain Vosterloch has returned from his voyage to the southern lands which he started on two years and a half ago, by order of the States-General. He tells us among other things that in passing through a strait below Magellan's, he landed in a country where Nature has furnished men with a kind of sponges which hold sounds and articulations as our sponges hold liquids. So, when they wish to dispatch a message to a distance, they speak to one of the sponges, and then send it to their friends. They, receiving the sponges, take them up gently and press out the words that have been spoken into them, and learn this by admirable means all that their correspondents desire them to know."

Cyrano de Bergerac, in his Histoire comique des États et Empires de la Lune, whose first edition is dated as early as 1650, is still more precise. He relates that the genius that guided him to our satellite gave him for his entertainment some of the books of the country. These books are inclosed in boxes. "On opening the box I found inside a concern of metal, something like one of our watches, full of curious little springs and minute machinery. It was really a book, but a wonderful book that has no leaves or letters; a book, for the understanding of which the eyes are of no use—only the ears are necessary. When any one wishes to read, he winds up the machine with its great number of nerves of all kinds, and turns the pointer to the chapter he wishes to hear, when there come out, as if from the mouth of a man or of an instrument of music, the distinct and various sounds which serve the Great Lunarians as the expression of language." A few pages before this, Cyrano speaks of transparent globes, that serve for lighting, in which a non-heating lamp has been placed.

We are next told about microbes: "Figure the universe as a great animal; the stars that are worlds as other great animals which serve as worlds to other people like. us, our horses, etc., and that we, in our turn, are like worlds in respect to certain animals still incomparably smaller than we, as are certain worms, fleas, and flesh-worms; that these are the earth to others still more imperceptible; and that just as we appear, each individual of us, a great world to these little people, it may be also that our flesh and our blood are only a tissue of little animals which maintain themselves, lend us motion by theirs and let themselves be led blindly by our will which serves them as a coachman, lead us in our turn, and produce altogether the action which we call life. Does not the itch prove what I am saying? Is the worm that causes it anything but one of these little animals which has deprived itself of civil society to constitute itself a tyrant of its country? That