s waves, and
required no tympanum. Moreover, the microphone, as its name implies,
could magnify a feeble sound, and render audible the vibrations which
would otherwise escape the ear. The discovery of these remarkable and
subtle properties of a delicate contact had indeed confronted Edison;
he had held them in his grasp, they had stared him in the face, but
not-withstanding all his matchless ingenuity and acumen, he, blinded
perhaps by a false hypothesis, entirely failed to discern them. The
significant proof of it lies in the fact that after the researches of
Professor Hughes were published the carbon transmitter was promptly
modified, and finally abandoned for practical work as a telephone, in
favour of a variety of new transmitters, such as the Blake, now
employed in the United Kingdom, in all of which the essential part is
a microphone of hard carbon and metal. The button of soot has vanished
into the limbo of superseded inventions.

Science appears to show that every physical process is reciprocal,
and may be reversed. With this principle in our minds, we need not be
surprised that the microphone should not only act as a TRANSMITTER of
sounds, but that it should also act as a RECEIVER. Mr. James Blyth, of
Edinburgh, was the first to announce that he had heard sounds and
even speech given out by a microphone itself when substituted for the
telephone. His transmitting microphone and his receiving one were simply
jelly-cans filled with cinders from the grate. It then transpired that
Professor Hughes had previously obtained the same remarkable effects
from his ordinary 'pencil' microphones. The sounds were extremely
feeble, however, but the transmitting microphones proved the best
articulating ones. Professor Hughes at length constructed an adjustable
hammer-and-anvil microphone of gas-carbon, fixed to the top of a
resonating drum, which articulated fairly well, although not so
perfectly as a Bell telephone. Perhaps a means of improving both the
volume and distinctness of the articulation will yet be forthcoming
and we may be able to speak solely by the microphone, if it is found
desirable. The marvellous fact that a little piece of charcoal can, as
it were, both listen and speak, that a person may talk to it so that
his friend can hear him at a similar piece a hundred miles away, is a
miracle of nineteenth century science which far transcends the oracles
of antiquity.

The articulating telephone was the forerunner o