Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/439

Rh the signal at Port Elizabeth is always heard at Portland, a distance of nine miles. The observations at the South Foreland, where the sound has been proved to reach a distance of more than twelve miles against the wind, backed by decisive experiments, reduce to certainty the surmises of General Duane. It has, for example, been proved that a couple of gas-flames placed in a chamber can, in a minute or two, render its air so non-homogeneous as to cut a sound practically off; while the same sound passes without sensible impediment through showers of paper-scraps, seeds, bran, rain-drops, and through fumes and fogs of the densest description. The sound also passes through thick layers of calico, silk, serge, flannel, baize, close felt, and through pads of cotton-net impervious to the strongest light.

As long indeed as the air on which snow, hail, rain, or fog, is suspended is homogeneous, so long will sound pass through the air, sensibly heedless of the suspended matter. This point is illustrated upon a large scale by my own observations on the Mer de Glace, and by those of General Duane, at Portland, which prove the snow-laden air from the northeast to be a highly homogeneous medium. Prof. Henry thus accounts for the fact that the northeast snow-wind renders the sound of Cape Elizabeth audible at Portland: In the higher regions of the atmosphere he places an ideal wind, blowing in a direction opposed to the real one, which always accompanies the latter, and which more than neutralizes its action. In speculating thus he bases himself on the reasoning of Prof. Stokes, according to which a sound-wave moving against the wind is tilted upward. The upper and opposing wind is invented for the purpose of tilting again the already lifted sound-wave downward. Prof. Henry does not explain how the sound-wave recrosses the hostile lower current, nor does he give any definite notion of the conditions under which it can be shown that it will reach the observer.

This, so far as I know, is the only theoretic gleam cast by the Washington Report on the conflicting results which have hitherto rendered experiments on fog-signals so bewildering. I fear it is an ignis fatuus, instead of a safe guiding light. Prof. Henry, however, boldly applies the hypothesis in a variety of instances. But he dwells with particular emphasis upon a case of non-reciprocity which he considers absolutely fatal to my views regarding the flocculence of the atmosphere. The observation was made on board the steamer City of Richmond, during a thick fog in a night of 1872. "The vessel was approaching Whitehead from the southwestward, when, at a distance of about six miles from the station, the fog-signal, which is a ten-inch steam-whistle, was distinctly perceived, and continued to be heard with increasing intensity of sound until within about three miles, when the sound suddenly ceased to be heard, and was not perceived again until the vessel, approached within a quarter of a mile of the