Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 13.djvu/53

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HOW SOUND AND WORDS ARE PRODUCED.
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more general and extensive than they have become in later industrial times. It is observable, too, how, even now, that representative of the primitive oblation which we still have in the bread and wine of the mass and the sacrament (offered to God before being consumed by communicants) recurs less frequently here than in Catholic societies, which are relatively more militant in type of organization; while the offering of incense, which is one of the primitive forms of sacrifice among various peoples, and survives in the Catholic service, has disappeared from the authorized service in England. Nor in our own society do we fail to trace a kindred contrast; for, while within the Established Church, which forms part of that regulative structure developed by militancy, sacrificial observances still continue, they have ceased among those most unecclesiastical of dissenters, the Quakers; who, absolutely unmilitant, show us also by the absence of an established priesthood, and by the democratic form of their government, the type of organization most remote from militancy and most characteristic of industrialism.

The like holds even with the custom of present-giving for purposes of social propitiation. We see this on comparing European nations, which, otherwise much upon a par in their stages of progress, differ in the degrees to which industrialism has qualified militancy. In Germany, where periodic making of gifts among relatives and friends is a universal obligation, and in France, where the burden similarly entailed is so onerous that at Christmas and Easter people not unfrequently leave home to escape it, this social usage survives in greater strength than in England, less militant in organization.

Of this kind of ceremony, then, as of the kinds already dealt with, we may say that, taking shape with the establishment of that political headship which militancy produces, it develops with the development of the militant type of social structure, and declines with the development of the industrial type.

HOW SOUND AND WORDS ARE PRODUCED.

By GEORGE M. SHAW.

THE recent appearance of those remarkable devices the telephone and the phonograph has given such a new interest to the general subject of voice, music, and sound, and the conditions and mechanisms by which they are produced, that a familiar explanation of some of the points involved may be useful at the present time.

Prof. Tyndall, in his work "On Sound," speaking of a tremendous powder-explosion which occurred at Erith, England, in 1864, shattering the windows on every side, though the village was some miles from the magazine, says: "Lead sashes were employed in Erith church, and