our inability to see and hear depends on the absolute incapacity of the retina or the ear to be affected by waves of a given length, of course no microphone, any more than any microscope, will render them perceptible. The microscope does not show us new colors, and the microphone will not show us new sounds. But just as the microscope renders not only visible, but large and conspicuous, what we could not previously discern simply from its minuteness, so the microphone will render distinct and even loud what we could not previously discern, simply from the want of volume in the sound. The first result should be to provide these who are only deaf — whose auditory nerve is not destroyed — with a nearly perfect ear-trumpet, — not, of course, one which will enable them to gather in the general and confused sounds of a room with all the distinctness of good hearing, for the very essence of this instrument is that it can only magnify the isolated vibrations received on the vibrating-plate at the other end of the conducting-wire, but still complete for the purposes of any isolated sound; that is, sufficient not only to make it audible, but to make it perfectly clear and distinct. But far more curious results should follow. With the help of the microphone, it should be possible to hear the sap rise in the tree; to hear it rushing against small obstacles to its rise, as a brook rushes against the stones in its path; to hear the bee suck its honey from the flower; to hear the rush of the blood through the smallest of the blood-vessels, and the increase of that rush due to the slightest inflammatory action. In fact, the new instrument should add a hundred times as much to the means of investigating the facts of both vegetable and animal physiology, as the stethoscope added to the knowledge of the structure of the heart and lungs; for while the stethoscope only collected the sound, the microphone will magnify it.
That, however, which strikes the imagination most in this wonderful discovery is not so much what it is sure to do, as the wonderful world of possibility it opens. It is almost certain that a ray of light strikes the surface on which it impinges with a definite force, and Mr. Crookes certainly supposed that he had found the means of approximating to a calculation of that force. But if this be so, there must be a definite sound caused by light touching a surface, and the new instrument may enable us not merely to see, but to hear light. It is quite conceivable that by the use of the microphone the chemist who is trying to analyze the spectrum of a star may be enabled to hear the first ray of the star strike upon his spectroscope, and to listen to the gentle rain of rays which follows while the spectroscope is exposed to that star, and then to exchange that gentle sound for that of the torrent which would follow when he exposed his instrument to the moon instead of the star. We may find that the rippling of the light from Sirius has a sound quite different in character from the rippling of the light from Arcturus or the Polar Star; and all of these onsets of starry light, if they can be heard at all, must make a sound as inferior to the cataract which rushes from the sun, as the dash of a brook is inferior to the roar of Niagara. It may be, too, that the sound made by the different prismatic rays, as they strike a surface, will produce a harmony as delightful and as susceptible of indefinite variation as the prismatic colors themselves, so that the most exquisite musical instruments might be produced by merely opening the ear to the sounds (at present too slight for any ear to perceive) corresponding to the colors of the rainbow, and varying the combinations at the discretion of the musician. Wagner, in one of his great works produced in this country, has, we believe, a "Rainbow Chorus," which was greatly admired, but which did not, without help from the words of the libretto, suggest to the audience that association with a rainbow which he had imaginatively ascribed to it. May it not be possible, with the help of the microphone, to give us a true rainbow music, — a music really caused by the sound of the same waves which, in their effect on the optic nerve, produce the vision of the rainbow? This is, of course, mere dreaming. But one of the most delightful results of great discoveries like this, is that it fosters so much a dreaming power not quite divorced from possibility, and therefore not quite of a kind to discontent us with the world in which our actual duties lie.
THE FEAST OF LANTERNS AT CANTON
The feast was held on the three nights of the September full moon — our harvest moon — and celebrates the birth of that luminary, sister to the celestial lord of the five-clawed dragon. On the swell night, that of actual full moon — every Chinese
