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That of Helmholtz has held the field so long that, although weighty objections have been raised to it, it must still be treated with respect. In introducing it a short review of the familiar facts of the physics and physiology of hearing may not be out of place.
Helmholtz says: "If we accept the hypothesis that simple bodies are composed of atoms, we are obliged to admit that, in the same way, electricity, whether positive or negative, is composed of elementary parts which behave like atoms of electricity."
Truly a prodigious undertaking in those dark days, when from the standpoint of Edison's large experience the most practical and correct electrical treatise was contained in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and in a German publication which Mr. Upton had brought with him after he had finished his studies with the illustrious Helmholtz. It was at this period that Mr.
At the rate my money was going May would see me bankrupt. I read both day and night, grappling with Darwin, Spencer, Fiske, Helmholtz, Haeckel, all the mighty masters of evolution whose books I had not hitherto been able to open.
From the painting by Lieutenant Farré. The fallacy that a man could, by the rapid flapping of wings of any sort, overcome the force of gravity persisted up to a very recent day, despite the complete mathematical demonstration by von Helmholtz in 1878 that man could not possibly by his own muscular exertions raise his own weight into the air and keep it suspended.
One may evade the difficulty, as Helmholtz did, by regarding life as eternal that it had no beginning in time; or, as some other German biologists have done, that the entire cosmos is alive and the earth a living organism. If biogenesis is true, and always has been true, no life without antecedent life, then the question of a beginning is unthinkable.
Not to stray into foreign topics, it may broadly be said that as all change resolves itself into motion, and, as Helmholtz remarks, all science merges itself into mechanics, we should commence by asking what vital motions these sensations stand for or correspond to. Every organism, and each of its parts, is the resultant of innumerable motions, a composition of forces.
With respect to sounds, Helmholtz has explained to a certain extent on physiological principles, why harmonies and certain cadences are agreeable. But besides this, sounds frequently recurring at irregular intervals are highly disagreeable, as every one will admit who has listened at night to the irregular flapping of a rope on board ship.
He had a pretty house in the new quarter of Berlin, and was most hospitable. He had an interesting dinner there with some of the literary men and savants Mommsen, Leppius, Helmholtz, Curtius, etc., most of them his colleagues, as he was a member of the Berlin Academy.
In the case of water, which is almost incompressible, this property is well marked, and unquestionably would be very nearly the same if water were wholly incompressible. In the case of the air, it is conceded by Tyndall, Thomson, Daniell, Helmholtz, and others that any compression or condensation of the air must be well marked or defined to secure the transmission of a sound pulse.
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