The Highland weekly news. [volume] (Hillsborough [Hillsboro], Highland County, Ohio) 1853-1886, 1879-05-15
ttSOTND .

EDITOR NEWS "A certain article which
appeared in the News some time since, re-
minded me Of the story Of Hercules and
certain class Of men in Africa. You viii
find the story told very amusingly in HaT-
thorne's ''TanglewOod Tales" / leave the
application for my readers to make.
ffthe writer Of the article to which I re-
fer, should succeed in annihilating "Dar-
win, Huxley & Co." 1 shall say nothing
about it, either pro or con, but shall We
pass over in silence the gentleman's article
on S0uHdf
"An emanation Of substantial corpus
cles" is souuld-when you pronounce it,,
"my dear Flora;" indeed it has far
more sound in it than sense.
If / understand the writer, he would CX-
press himself, if he could, in common Ian
| guage, thus: "SOund IS produced By small
particles Of matter driven of By the Sounding
body
Now, when a speaker addresses an audi
| ence, minute paItic es of his organs Of speech
are urencied of BY some process, and shot at
| his hearers in all directions, with almost the
velocity of a riAe-balu This is not absurd,
however. The little insect too, Of which
he speaks, drives particles of its own body
to the distance of a mile in all directions
/ In his calculation he supPOses the insect
to be inclosed in a solid II presume this,
as according to his calculation each cubic
foot must weigh about 81 pOunds) globe Of
tympanic membranes, two miles in diane
| ter, and then expects the advocates Of the
/ Wave Theory to admit lhat the insect can
! vibrate the entire mass 'onee in, once out,
| 400 times a secOndF'
Of course this bears the stamp of a sin
cere, careful scientists calculation, and
has nothing absurd in it, except the absur-
dity that all this mass would be set in mo-
ton, and if the advocates Of the Wave
Theory do not maintain that this is pos
sible, why their theory is false, @. E d.
Any advocate Of the Wave Theory of
Sound would say, the fact that the insect
can be heard at the distance being granted
that any one tympanic membrane situ-
ated anywhere within this globe, would Vi
brate, or that any number, not so great as
to interfere with the sound waves, would
/ vibrate. But when they are placed sOneaT
each other as to interfere with the waves Of
sound, the insect could not be heard at the
distance of a mile, and the more paCtlv
/ they are placed the less the distance to
which 1t can be heard.
Let us test the reasonableness of this gen
tleman's theory, or the sOundness of his
logic, whichever he pleases to call It, by
applying both to the sound made by the
'locust" He would put it thus: The in
sect inClOsed in the solid globe, two miles
in diameter, drircs through this mass (as-
founding torcel) an infinite number Of sub
stantial cOrpuscles" from its own body, in
an infinite number of directions; yet this
is not so "abSurd" as the theory that sup
poses that the particles Of air are very elias
tic, and transmit their energy in all di-
rections with very little diminution Of
force.
If the gentleman fails in some of his ex-
periments to get the same result that Tyn-
dali did, he should remember that begin
ners, as a rule, make mUHg failures in their
experiments, A FARMER.