yoming. The trial was not satisfactory, however, for the apparatus was
mounted on a hen-house, which trembled to the gale, and before he could
get it properly adjusted the eclipse was over.

It is reported that on another trial the light from the star Arcturus,
when focussed on the vulcanite, was capable of deflecting the needle
of the galvanometer. When gelatine is substituted for vulcanite, the
humidity of the atmosphere can also be measured in the same way.

Edison's crowning discovery at Menlo Park was the celebrated
'phonograph,' or talking machine. It was first announced by one of
his assistants in the pages of the SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN for 1878. The
startling news created a general feeling of astonishment, mingled with
incredulity or faith. People had indeed heard of the talking heads of
antiquity, and seen the articulating machines of De Kempelen and Faber,
with their artificial vocal organs and complicated levers, manipulated
by an operator. But the phonograph was automatic, and returned the
words which had been spoken into it by a purely mechanical mimicry. It
captured and imprisoned the sounds as the photograph retained the images
of light. The colours of Nature were lost in the photograph, but the
phonograph was said to preserve the qualities even of the human voice.
Yet this wonderful appliance had neither tongue nor teeth, larynx nor
pharynx. It appeared as simple as a coffee-mill. A vibrating diaphragm
to collect the sounds, and a stylus to impress them on a sheet of
tinfoil, were its essential parts. Looking on the record of the sound,
one could see only the scoring of the stylus on the yielding surface of
the metal, like the track of an Alpine traveller across the virgin snow.
These puzzling scratches were the foot-prints of the voice.

Speech is the most perfect utterance of man; but its powers are limited
both in time and space. The sounds of the voice are fleeting, and do not
carry far; hence the invention of letters to record them, and of signals
to extend their range. These twin lines of invention, continued through
the ages, have in our own day reached their consummation. The smoke
of the savage, the semaphore, and the telegraph have ended in the
telephone, by which the actual voice can speak to a distance; and now
at length the clay tablet of the Assyrian, the wax of the ancient
Greek, the papyrus of the Egyptian, and the modern printing-press have
culminated in the phonograph, by which the living