he sound of
"v" they usually pronounce "b," while "r" resembles "w" or "rw" when
initial, but as a final sound is usually suppressed. They have a marked
tendency to omit auxiliary and final sounds, and in all departures from
the higher types of speech tend back to ancestral forms.

I believe if we could apply the rule of perspectives and throw our
vanishing point far back beyond the chasm that separates man from his
Simian prototype, that we would find one unbroken outline tangent to
every circle of life from man to protozoa in language, mind, and
matter.

CHAPTER XXIII.

The Human Voice--Human Bagpipe--Human Piccolo, Flute, and
Fife--The Voice as a Whistle--Music and Noise--Dr. Bell and his
"Visible Speech."

One of the very curious feats which I have performed with the phonograph
is the conversion of the human voice into the sounds of various
instruments. I had my wife sing the familiar Scotch ballad, "Comin'
through the Rye," to the phonograph while the cylinder was rotating at
the rate of about forty revolutions per minute. Each word in the song
was distinctly pronounced and the music rendered in a plain, smooth
tone. I then increased the speed of the machine to about one hundred and
twenty per minute, at which rate I reproduced the song. It was a very
perfect imitation of the bagpipe with no sign whatever of articulation.
The melody was preserved with only a change of time. The speech
character was so completely destroyed that I repeated this record to a
large audience in which were several eminent musicians, not one of whom
suspected that it was not a real bagpipe solo. In like manner I have
converted the sounds of the voice into a very perfect piccolo, flute,
fife, and into a fairly good imitation of a whistle sound. To produce
the whistling effect and the fife sound the rate of speed must be
necessarily very high, and some notes will not be perfectly converted
for some reason which I have not yet fully understood. Some voices are
much more easily converted into the flute effect than others. To get the
best flute sounds, a full, smooth, mezzo-soprano gives the best effect.
In reversing the operation, the sounds of these instruments can be made
to imitate the human voice somewhat, but not exactly, not only in the
fact that the modulation is wanting and there is no semblance to
consonant sounds, but the tone itself differs in quality from that of
the voice.

[Sidenote: CONTOUR OF SOUNDS]