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The tympan employed for receiving is made of gold-beater's skin, having a stud at its centre and a springy stylus of steel wire. The sounds emitted by this device are almost a whisper as compared to the original ones, but they are faithful in articulation, which is the main object, and they are conveyed to the ear by means of flexible hearing-tubes.
This is the sound record, and by substituting a finer tympan for the one used in producing it, the ridges and inequalities of the trace can be made to agitate a light stylus resting on them, and cause it to set the delicate tympan into vibrations corresponding very accurately to those of the original sounds.
We may call him toad-hopper or spittle-bug, or as Fabre says, "Contentons-nous de Cicadelle, qui respecte le tympan." Like all of its kindred, the Bubble Bug finds Nirvana in a sappy green stem. It has neither strong flight, nor sticky wax, thorny armature nor gas barrage, so it proceeds to fashion an armor of bubbles, a cuirass of liquid film.
It is Gothic, but the general treatment has much of that Byzantine-Romanesque which produced some very remarkable buildings in Southern France. The portal is very wide and deeply recessed, and the tympan is crowded with bas-reliefs, the sculpture of which, rude yet expressive, is of a striking originality.
The façade, with its squat towers, exhibits no lofty aim, but when one looks at the tabernacle-work in the tympan of the divided portal, the capitals in the jambs and the mouldings of the archivolts, the elegant arcade above and the tracery of the great rose window, one feels that although the Pointed style could not yet embody its dream of beauty by means of the tower and spire, it was moving towards it through a maze of glorious ideas destined to become inseparable from the spirit of the perfect whole.
This church, a small Gothic edifice of the twelfth century, has a far-projecting porch enriched with a specimen of mediaeval carving which is a long delight to the few archaeologists who find their way to the almost forgotten village of Carennac. The composition, which fills the tympan of the scarcely-pointed arch, represents Christ surrounded by the twelve Apostles.
In the diagram the two disks are shown separated for the purpose of explanation, but in reality they rest the one against the other; the smaller and movable disk, G squared, is held up against G with greater or less pressure by the spiral spring, S, the tension of which can be adjusted by a screw or other suitable device at N. This form of the apparatus is more suitable for inclosure in a wall box with or without a mouthpiece, but it does not require the employment of any kind of diaphragm or tympan.
The ornament is nearly confined to the tympan over the portal, the capitals of columns, and to the choir with its seven absidal chapels.
Thus recorded on a yielding but somewhat stiff material, these undulations could be preserved, and at a future time made to deflect the point of a similar stylus, and set a corresponding diaphragm or tympan into vibration, so as to give out the original sounds, or an imitation of them. Tinfoil, however, is not a very satisfactory material on which to receive the vibrations in the first place.
Over the cylinder is supported a diaphragm or tympan T, provided with a conical mouthpiece M for speaking into.
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