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Updated: June 9, 2025
Now, a sounding body will not only jar another body which touches it, but it will also give its motion to the air that touches it; and when the air-motions or air-waves strike the sensitive drums of our ears, these vibrate, and we hear the sound. You all have heard the windows rattle when it thunders loudly, or when cannons have been fired near-by.
A stick half-immersed in water always looks broken, however well we may know that the appearance is due to the bending of the rays of light. Similarly, an echo always sounds as though it came from some object in the direction in which the air-waves finally travel to the ear, though we are perfectly sure that these undulations have taken a circuitous course.
These, like the air-waves, were also registered by self-acting tide-gauges and by personal observation all over the world, and the observations coincided as to date with the great eruptions of the 26th and 27th of August.
Now, just in the same way the tiny instrument of three thousand strings in your ear, which is called Corti's organ, vibrates to the air-waves, one thread to one set of waves, and another to another, and according to the fibre that quivers, will be the sound you hear. Here then at last, we see how nature speaks to us.
The instrument must not only translate sound-waves into electric impulses, but change these back again into sound-waves; it must not only hear, but also speak! You remember our first fact in regard to sound: it is caused by motion. All that is needed to make anything speak is to cause it to move so as to give rise to just such air-waves as the voice makes. Mr.
Across the end of this canal, a membrane or skin called the tympanum is stretched, like the parchment over the head of a drum, and it is this membrane which moves to and fro as the air-waves strike on it. A violent box on the ear will sometimes break this delicate membrane, or injure it, and therefore it is very wrong to hit a person violently on the ear.
If you go near to a harp or a piano, and sing any particular note very loudly, you will hear this note sounding in the instrument, because you will set just that particular string quivering, which gives the note you sang. The air-waves set going by your voice touch that string, because it can quiver in time with them, while none of the other strings can do so.
On that day all the gas lights were extinguished in Batavia, and the pictures rattled on the walls as though from the action of an earthquake. But there was no earthquake. It was the air-wave from Krakatoa, and the noise produced by the air-waves that followed was described as "deafening."
This concha makes a curve much like the curve a deaf man makes with his hand behind his ear to catch the sound. Animals often have to raise their ears to catch the sound well, but ours stand always ready. When the air-waves have passed in at the hole of your ear, they move all the air in the passage, which is called the auditory, or hearing, canal.
In the endeavour to conceive it, the origin of sound-waves has been in mind, where longitudinal air-waves are produced by the vibrations of a sounding body, and molecular impact is the antecedent of the waves. The analogy does not apply. The following exposition may be helpful in grasping the idea of such transformation and change of energy from matter to the ether.
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