ceaselessly flowed through the country. Constructing a raft, he stored it with provisions to last him for many moons, launched it on the San Juan, to be carried by its swift currents whithersoever they went. After encountering many perils, he entered a large water, on the shores of which great rocks elevated their fronts to the stars. Driven ashore, he ascended to the top by perilous passes, and found them inhabited by a family of Indians, who received him with great rejoicings as the ruling spirit of their race, whose coming had been prophesied for ages by the wise men and priests. He took their wisest and most beautiful maiden for his bride, whose charms long rendered him forgetful of his own people; but the spirits of his fathers called him, and obedient to the call, he, with his wife, started for home. Imminent dangers beset their path; but the guardian spirit of his bride led them through every peril safely to his people, by whom he was received as the pride and wonder of his race. But unfortunately for the Moquis, jealousy rankled in the bosom of their women. A foreign woman possessed the heart of the stateliest and bravest of their tribe. Subjected by them to every indignity that wicked ingenuity could devise, and too proud to make known her grievances, the bride, determined on revenge, gave birth to a brood of serpents, against the charmed lives of which neither the arrows nor battle-axes of the Moquis could avail. The Moqui children were slain by their deadly fangs. The people, pursued by this terrible foe, fled from the land of their fathers, till, on reaching the country in which they now dwell, a mighty serpent lashed their pursuers to atoms, and commanded the Moquis to possess his hills and valleys, and to live at peace with all his kind. In gratitude to their deliverer, the wise men of the tribe established the Snake-dance as a religious rite; and for ages, no serpent has been killed by that tribe, nor Moqui bitten who follows the teaching of the snake-priests. Such was the chieftain's history of the festival. The following is Keam's narrative of the snakedance. granted admission to the estufa, and on descending by a ladder from the centre of the roof, we found the snakes, from one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty in number, contained in large oval earthenware urns. Soon after we had entered, a ceremony was gone through by those of the priesthood who were present. Pouring the living mass out of the urns, they, with their wands, drove them around the floor of the estufa from east to west, and then around an altar laid in the rock floor two feet from the west wall of the building. This altar was coloured variously in squares, and on each of its four sides a snake was painted in natural colours. Around it lay stone implements, knives, axes, arrows, hammers, a large mortar and figures of small animals in stone, as well as a number of the eaglefeather wands, one of which is placed beside the altar when a snake-priest dies, remaining there until the chief-priest declares that the departed one is happy in the Spirit-land. The priests all wore waistband, breech-cloth, and moccasins fringed with red; besides which, their faces were painted, from forehead to mouth, black; from mouth over the chin, white; their bodies, pink; their arms and legs dyed a dark brown. Around the right leg, below the knee, was attached an ornament made of tortoiseshell, together with the horny part of a deer's hoof, which in the dancing which followed produced a sort of humming rattle resembling the noise of a rattlesnake in anger. During their exercises in the estufa, the priests drank freely from a large urn containing medicine-water. The The Snake-dance itself took place about four o'clock in the afternoon. A cotton-wood grotto had been erected on the rock near the estufa, with a single buffalo robe tied firmly round it, leaving a small entrance on one side. Around this was traced a mystic circle thirty feet in diameter. Within the grotto the snakes were now deposited en masse. The dancers were twenty-four in number, the remaining eighteen priests being reserved to receive the snakes from their hands and to chant during the progress of the dance. The dancers first advanced towards the grotto wands in hand. Then wheeling round, they separated Preparations for the dance, which we witnessed, twelve a side, and formed in line, representing had been in progress for eight days. The snake- the two sides of a triangle, of which the grotto priests, forty-two in number, devoted the first was the apex. The eighteen followed, dividing four days to secret rites. The four succeeding days equally, and facing the dancers, while all joined were employed in capturing the snakes which in a wild chant, accompanied by a continuous haunt the sandy plains around the puebla (village), sounding of the above-mentioned rattles. With a wand, painted, and bearing at one end chief-priest then advanced to the entrance of the two black eagles' feathers, the priests caress grotto, bearing an urn of medicine-water from the heads of the snakes as they coil in the the estufa, two large sea-shells, and two stone sand. The snake-priests are supposed to have figures of mountain lions. Chanting in a monoborrowed this idea from the habit of the eagle, tone, he stood for about ten minutes waving the which, when capturing snakes, is said to charm urn in the air. Another dance and chant folthem to comparative harmlessness by hover- lowed; upon the conclusion of which, the nearest ing over and fanning them with a rapid and priest on the right entered the grotto on hands peculiar motion of its wings. Having secured and knees among the writhing and hideous mass, a sufficient number of the reptiles, they are car- soon reappearing with a large snake in his mouth, ried in sacks to the estufa-the council-house its head and tail twisting about his face. Being of the Moquis. This chamber is an excavation in the solid rock from nine to ten feet deep, by eighteen feet wide and twenty feet long, covered with poles, mud, and stones. Hung on the walls in fantastic groups are highly ornamented moccasins, breech-cloths, waistbands, rattles, and tortoiseshells. On the morning of the dance, we were taken by the left arm by a fellow-priest next him, he was led around the mystic circle. The snake was then dropped on some sacred cornmeal which the squaws had scattered within its bounds. Immediately on falling, the creature coiled in anger, whereupon one of the eighteen caressed its head with his wand and took it in 16 CHAMBERS'S JOURNAL. his hands. The ceremony was then repeated by the other dancers, who, entering the grotto on hands and knees, brought out the snakes in their mouths, sometimes two at a time, and danced round the circle on the rocks with them, until the whole had been taken from the grotto and placed in the hands of the attendant priests. The snakes were then thrown, a writhing mass, into a pile of corn-meal, upon which the whole priesthood rushed pell-mell to the pile, and seizing them in their hands, divided into four bands, tore wildly down the rocky slopes of the mesa, and liberated their captives in the sands on the north, south, east, and west sides of the village. WOLF-CHILDREN. As supplementary to our article on Wolf- Futtehpore is a small civil station seventythree miles north-west of Allahabad, and was the scene of the Nána's first check by Havelock. The American Presbyterians had and have a Mission there, with Orphanage attached, and this was in my charge as civil surgeon in pre-mutiny days. The Mission and Orphanage were presided over by the Rev. Gopinath Nandy, an old man, who fell subsequently into the rebel Moulvi's hands at Allahabad, and was only saved from death by Brigadier-general Neil's force. To this Orphanage was brought by the police, early in 1857, a child, which they declared had been found in a wolf's den among the ravines of the Jamna; and I was summoned to see it. I obeyed with alacrity, for here was a proof in point of what at school we had been taught to regard as fabulous, the suckling of Romulus and Remus by a wolf. This human cub was a native child about six or seven, filthy in aspect, disgusting in odour and habit, with matted hair, and timid suspicious face. Mr Nandy told me that the child had no speech, though not dumb, would wear no clothes, and would eat nothing Its efforts to escape were placed before it. incessant. 'Confronted with this wretched object, I placed a hand on his head, and said a word or two of kindness in Hindustani; but got no response beyond a kind of cackle. The poor child was evidently a burden to the Padre, who knew not how to manage it. I recommended non-coercive confinement, with lots of straw and blanket, and a gradual introduction to civilised food, cooked bones being the present substitute. At my next visit I found dismay on the worthy Padre's face; nothing would succeed with the wolf-cub, and the whole establishment was upset in looking after him and preventing escape. I found him On seeing me wandering about the garden. he ran up and seized my knees, and then the one vocable of his language escaped him as he looked upwards at me, and that was "ság."* The memory of home and home-food had dawned upon * Ság, which with us is the specific native word for spinach, is among natives the generic term for various plants and plant-tops. Tender gram and turnip shoots, and a host of plants unknown to us as food, are classed under that term. him as he laid at my feet a handful of the weed. All Rights Reserved. POPULAR LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART. Fourth Sexiez CONDUCTED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS. No. 994.-VOL. XX. SATURDAY, JANUARY 13, 1883. CURIOSITIES OF THE TELEPHONE. GREAT inventions are often conceived a long time before they are realised in practice. Sometimes the original idea occurs to the man who subsequently works it out; and sometimes it comes as a happy thought to one who is either in advance of his age, or who is prevented by adverse circumstances from following it up, and who yet lives to see the day when some more fortunate individual gives it a material shape, and so achieves the fame which was denied to him. Such is the case of M. Charles Bourselle, who in 1854 proposed a form of speaking-telephone, which although not practicable in its first crude condition, might have led its originator to a more successful instrument if he had pursued the subject further. Bourselle is now a superintendent of telegraph lines at Auch, in France; and, in recognition of his primitive idea, has lately been enrolled as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. It was believed by most people, and even by eminent electricians, that the speaking-telephone had never been dreamed of by any one before Professor Graham Bell introduced his marvellous little apparatus to the scientific world. But that was a mistake. More than one person had thought of such a thing, Bourselle among the number. Philip Reis, a German electrician, had even constructed an electric telephone in 1864, which transmitted words with some degree of perfection; and the assistant of Reis asserts that it was designed to carry music as well as words. Professor Bell, in devising his telephone, copied the human ear with its vibrating drum. The first iron plate he used as a vibrator was a little piece of clock-spring glued to a parchment diaphragm, and on saying to the spring on the telephone at one end of the line: "Do you understand what I say?' the answer from his assistant at the other end came back immediately: Yes; I understand you perfectly.' The sounds were feeble, and he had to hold his ear close to the little piece of iron on the parchment, but they PRICE 1d. were distinct; and though Reis had transmitted certain single words some ten years before, Bell was the first to make a piece of matter utter sentences. Reis gave the electric wire a tongue so that it could mumble like an infant; but Bell taught it to speak. Bell's telephone was first exhibited in America at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876; and in England, at the Glasgow meeting of the British Association in September of that year. On that occasion, Sir William Thomson pronounced it, with enthusiasm, to be the 'greatest of all the marvels of the electric telegraph.' The surprise created by its first appearance was, however, nothing to the astonishment and delight which it aroused in this country when Professor Bell, the following year, himself exhibited it in London to the Society of Telegraph Engineers. Since then, its introduction as a valuable aid to social life has been very rapid, and the telephone is now to be found in use from China to Peru. But while the telephone conveys the vibrations of the voice with singular fidelity, it does not do so with the same perfection as the human ear, so that a given voice is slightly changed when heard through the telephone from what it is when heard from mouth to ear. The drum of the telephone is a flat plate, which has a fundamental note of its own, and it is more ready to vibrate in response to this note than to any other. Thus, the basic tones in the voice, which harmonise with this fundamental note, come out stronger in the telephone than the overtones, which do not; and hence a certain twang is given to the speaker's voice, which depends on the dimensions of the plate. Thus, for men's low voices the plate of a telephone should be larger than for the shriller voices of women and children. This peculiarity of the instrument was amusingly illustrated at the Paris International Electric Exhibition of 1881, by Professor D. E. Hughes, the discoverer of the microphone. As a member of the scientific jury who were reporting on the various exhibits in telegraphy, he was examining-along with his 18 CHAMBERS'S JOURNAL. colleagues, comprising several eminent foreign to fulfil the words of the poet, and 'waft a sigh electricians—a telephonic apparatus devised by Dr from Indus to the Pole.' But this was only a Werner Siemens; but they could not make it laboratory experiment; for on actual telegraph answer to their voices. Various names of foreign lines the leakage of electricity from the wire to savants were shouted into the mouthpiece of the the ground, damp and other drawbacks, render the telephone; but it would not respond. At length, transmission of speech by wire far less easy in Professor Hughes, who is an accomplished musi- practice than was at first supposed. Nevertheless, cian, stepped forward, and secretly ascertained it is on record that Mr Edison transmitted speech the fundamental note of the telephone by tapping over a line seven hundred and fifty miles long its plate. He then turned to his fellow-jurors in America; and conversation has been carried on over five hundred miles in India; three hunwith a smile, and remarked that there was a an dred and ninety miles, from Tabriz in Persia to peculiarity about this telephone: it was Anglophile, and would only respond to the Tiflis; and three hundred miles in Spain, Aushonoured name of Faraday. The jurors naturally tralia, and other places where the atmosphere is treated his words with amiable derision; but this, dry and pure. In England, we have not been however, was soon changed to wonder when, after able to work through such long circuits, owing crying over the names of Siemens, Ohm, Volta, to the wetness of the atmosphere; but Mr Van Ampère, Franklin, the telephone remained obsti- Rysselberghe, the ingenious chief of the Meteoronately uncertain until he pronounced the magic logical Observatory at Brussels, has telephoned syllables Faraday, to which it joyously responded. from that city to Paris, a distance of two hundred The word Faraday had simply been spoken by and fifteen miles; and this while the same wire him in the same tone of voice as the fundamental was carrying simultaneously an ordinary Morse telegraphic message. By a peculiar disposition note of the telephone plate. of his apparatus, Mr Van Rysselberghe spoke to Paris by telephone without any interference from the Morse signals that were traversing the identical wire at the same time. The comparative feebleness of the voice as reproduced by the telephone has often struck observing persons. With the Bell telephone, it is necessary to hold the ear close to the diaphragm to hear any sound at all. Nevertheless, Mr Edison has constructed a little voice-mill, termed the Rotophone, in which a metal plate not only vibrates out and in under the impact of the voice, but at the same time sets in motion a small toothed wheel by an escapement, and can thus be made to perform work. This is in truth an ingenious method of bridging over the distinction between words and deeds. Moreover, it suggests possibilities of an 'Open Sesame' lock that will only yield to a particular watchword; and of a sympathetic cradle which would commence to rock when the baby murmured, and rock the faster as the baby cried the louder; thus affording a beautiful example of the fitness of things. The sensitiveness of the telephone is as remarkable as its fidelity to the sound-waves. A red-hot copper wire drawn across the rasp of a file was found, by Professor G. Forbes, to yield a series of thermo-electric currents which caused the Since telephone to give out a musical note. the time of Galvani, the nervous fibre of an animal has been regarded as the most exquisitely sensitive galvanoscope which we have for detecting electric currents; but the experiments of M. D'Arsonval prove that even an ill-made telephone is at least a hundred times more sensitive than the nerve, to feeble variations of the electric current. The power of the telephone to transmit the voice to long distances is intimately associated with its delicacy. Mr Willoughby Smith has found by experiment that a telephone will work through a 'resistance' of wire corresponding to a hundred and fifty thousand miles of telegraph line; and hence it would seem mere child's-play The day after the bombardment of Alexandria, it was announced in the London papers that the noise of the guns had been heard at Malta by telephone through a thousand miles of submarine cable. Experienced electricians took the statement with a grain of salt, because they knew that a submarine cable differs from a land-teleA graph wire in the greater retarding effect which it has on electric currents travelling along it. cable has the effect of running together-jumbling up-the delicate and rapidly succeeding vocal Five currents of the telephone, and either muffling the articulation or creating absolute silence. hundred miles of land-line would make little or no difference on the distinctness of a telephonic message, supposing the wire to be well insulated from the earth; but a hundred miles of ordinary submarine cable would probably be quite dumb. Indeed, some experiments made by the writer, with Dr Muirhead's artificial cable, show that while the voice could be faintly heard through a length equivalent to fifty, or even sixty miles, The inductive retardation had when it came to eighty miles no sound at all was audible. frittered away and blotted out the delicate undulations of the vocal currents. Telephonic messages have, however, been successfully sent by cable across the Channel, and from Holyhead to Dublin; but in no case has the length of The dream cable reached one hundred miles. of whispering across the Atlantic under the roaring forties' is likely to remain a dream for a long while to come. common in this Although aërial wires are country for telephonic work, in France, Germany, and other continental countries, underground Journal cables are chiefly employed. These are less subject to external injury, but are more liable to inductive retardation than the latter, though not so much as on a submarine cable. The peculiar crackling noises heard on aërial telephone lines which run close beside the ordinary telegraph wires, are easily cured on underground lines by employing a double wire in the cable, to form the going and returning pathways of the circuit. Then the currents travelling in neighbouring wires affect each of the two wires alike, but in opposite directions, and so the 'crackle' due to 'induction' is neutralised. currents. accompanied by accidents to the life and limb Marksmen can Besides the clamour set up in a telephone line by the electricity on neighbouring wires inducing audible currents in the telephone wire, there are disturbing noises caused by currents passing through the earth and entering the telephone Before leaving the subject of telephone lines, circuit, These are sometimes due to electric- we ought to mention their introduction into the lighting conductors, or to ordinary telegraph Manvers and Oak Collieries, to communicate wires running to the ground near by. In Man-between the galleries below and the pit-mouth. chester recently, all the telephone circuits were In times of accident, they may prove the only stopped because of the humming sound caused in means of communication between the miners the telephones by the escaping electric-light below and the help above. Experiments have been also repeatedly made with the telephone Lightning-storms too, and magnetic attached to the diver's helmet; and at last year's disturbances, are apt to cause floods of electricity North-east Coast Exhibition, every word spoken in the body of the earth, which overflow into or whispered in a diving-bell below water was the telephone lines and interfere with their heard above. Besides being taken into the depths working. The best remedy is to employ the of the sea and the bowels of the earth, the teledouble-wire system mentioned above, and not to phone has been lifted up into the skies, and use the earth at all as a return pathway, as is ordi- balloons have communicated with each other and narily done in telegraphy. The lightning-effect with the ground by their means. is readily heard by connecting a telephone to the now communicate with the scorer and learn the water-pipes of a house on the one hand, and to shore, as in the case of the Helicon line which effect of their shot; or ships can speak to the the gas-pipes on the other. On listening into enabled Sir Beauchamp Seymour to talk with the the instrument, every flash of lightning will be British Embassy at Alexandria. Even in Arctic accompanied by a crackling sound. The earth'- exploration it has been proposed to lay a telecurrents which often flow through the ground phone wire along the ice, to enable the sledgingalthough there is no thunder, can be heard in party bound for the Pole to communicate with the telephone by connecting it in circuit with the ship which forms its base of operations. a wire and two large metal plates buried in the Certainly the ice would be a good insulator, ground. The result has been likened to a boiling and the line would be a guide for any party of assistance. The scheme appears feasible enough, sound. The discharges of the magnificent aurora always supposing that the wire failed to excite borealis which was seen in New England on the curiosity of some Polar bear. August 4th of last year, were also heard in the telephone by a gentleman at Mont Clair, New Jersey, who likened them to the crackle which lightning gives, interspersed with feeble ringing taps repeated every half-second. Those fishes, the torpedo, the gymnotus or electric eel, and the electric ray, have also been caused to send their electric discharges through a telephone, and the sound heard has proved the emanation in each case to be an intermittent current. That of the torpedo is very powerful and prolonged, giving a moaning sound; that of the gymnotus is a sudden shock; and that of the ray resembles the discharge of the torpedo, but is very much feebler, owing to the smallness of its electric organ. In fact, a young torpedo the size of the hand will give a far more powerful shock than a full-grown ray. The violence of lightning-currents has been The minor applications of the telephone have been very numerous; but none has been so interesting in its results as the Induction Balance of Professor Hughes. By uniting it to the coils of the balance, that inventor has made the telephone very sensitive to the presence of metals; and it is possible to tell a good coin from a base one, or a worn coin from a new one, by the sounds given out by the telephone. Professor Roberts, indeed, has to a certain extent succeeded in assaying gold and silver coins by its aid; but the degree of hardness of the coin actually affects the result, although the weight and purity may be exact. Two years ago, an arrangement of the balance was proposed by Mr J. Munro, C.E., for prospecting metal veins; and this arrangement is substantially the same as that subsequently applied by Professor Graham Bell to locate the bullet in the body of the late lamented President Garfield, perhaps the noblest duty which the telephone was ever called upon to fulfil. The extreme delicacy |