motion, and its
reconversion into sound at a distance. The sound is, as it were,
committed to the electrical current and is thus sent to the end of the
journey, and there discharged with its message. The possibility of
this result lies first of all in the fact of electrical transmission
by wire, and in the second place to the mounting of a sound-rider on
the electrical saddle for an instantaneous journey with important
despatches!

New results in scientific progress generally seem marvelous. The
unfamiliar and unexpected thing is always a marvel; but scientifically
considered, the telephone does not seem so surprising as at first
view. The atmosphere is a conductor of sound. It is the natural agent
of transmission, and so far as the natural man is concerned, it is his
only agent for the transmission of oral utterance. If the unlearned
man have his attention called to the surprising fact of hearing his
fellow-man call out to him across a field or from far off on the
prairie, he does not think it marvelous, but only natural. Yet how
strange it is that one human being can speak to another through the
intervening space!

It is strange that one should see another at a distance; but seeing
and hearing at distances are natural functions of living creatures.
The sunlight is for one sense and the sound-wave is for the other. The
sound-wave travels on the atmosphere, and preserves its integrity. A
given sound is produced, and the same sound is heard by some ear at a
distance. All the people of the world are telephoning to one another;
for oral speech leaping from the vocal organs of one human being to
the ear of another is always telephonic. It is only when this
phenomenon of speech at a distance is taken from the soft wings of the
air, confined to a wire, and made to fly along the slender thread and
deliver itself afar in a manner to which the world has hitherto been a
stranger that the thing done and the apparatus by which it is done
seem miraculous. Indeed it is a miracle; for _miraculum_ signifies
wonderful.

The history of the invention of the telephone is easily apprehended.
The scientific principles on which it depends may be understood
without difficulty. There is, however, about the instrument and its
action something that is well nigh unbelievable. It is essentially a
thing contrary to universal experience, if not positively
inconceivable, that the slight phenomenon of the human voice should
be, so to speak, _picke