uttered months ago, in the very same manner and with the same cadence. In this way you may literally bottle a speech and reproduce it months hence; nor is there anything absurd in the principle in the joke of Punch's last "Comic Almanack," which suggested the bottling of various operatic performances and turning on the various taps at given signals. It is even scientifically conceivable,—we do not say it is very probable,—that after this fashion the nineteenth century may talk to the twenty-ninth, and be heard in the very words and cadences of a thousand years ago,—that a speech of Mr. Gladstone's, for example, or of Mr. Carlyle's, or of Mr. Biggar's should be thus registered on some more permanent equivalent for the tin-foil, and the rate of the revolution of the drum be carefully noted as the process takes place, so that when after a thousand years have elapsed, and when a generation of men probably far more different from ourselves than we are from the Saxons of Alfred's time are living here, this voice from the far-away past may be heard, reiterating counsels the very occasion of which is forgotten, or droning out complaints and accusations, the irrelevance of which shall then seem even greater, if that be possible, than it seems to us now. Talk of the urns of your ancestors' ashes,—the drums of their ancestors will be our posterity's most affecting mode of recalling their day. We might conceive every house furnished with such drums and vibrating plates, each stored with some speech, the speaker of which has long since been dead, and the anniversary of birth or death solemnized by the liberation of some one of such speeches from its long entombment. At the accession of each new monarch, we might have a chosen assembly called together to hear the most momentous speech from the throne ever delivered by the most remarkable of his predecessors, since the epoch when this method of preserving speech was first invented,—a Pope Leo XXI., for instance, surrounded by his cardinals, inclining his ear to the vibrating plate, from which should proceed the address uttered by Pio Nono to his last consistory, or a Hohenzollern of the twenty-first century summoning his cabinet to hear with him, for the third or fourth rehearsal, it may be, the precise words of the last assault directed against the see of Rome by the great Prince Bismarck. Nay, we may have speeches prepared expressly for posterity, as so many speeches have, in a metaphorical sense, been said to be. Lord Beaconsfield is just the man to lecture posterity on the great Asian mystery. What is to prevent him from creating a corporate body whose charter shall require them to preserve a drum and tin-foil scroll indented with his prophecy of the mode in which the Asian mystery will unfold itself,—the prophecy to be rehearsed once in every century after his death till its complete fulfilment shall have been verified? Doubtless, the prospect, is a formidable one. For, what with the many decipherers of apocalyptic riddles, and the many decipherers of scientific and metaphysical riddles, and the many decipherers of currency riddles, who are quite sure that they are right, we may well anticipate that a large part of the occupation of posterity will be either the task of reverentially listening to our very bad attempts at reading the future, or of irreverentially destroying the records intended, but not calculated, to inspire them with admiration of our foresight. Indeed the "drum ecclesiastic" alone, if when properly spiralled with tin-foil it can thus be made to yield back the ancient sounds of primeval controversy, would find quite occupation enough for the ears of posterity, to drown all the drums military of a pretty large Continental war.
But to turn from the more whimsical aspects of this very curious discovery to its more impressive aspects, certainly nothing of modern invention has proved so extraordinary an illustration of the subjective character of space-and-time distinctions as these two kinds of telephones,—the telephone which enables a man to speak at one point and be heard at another, hundreds of miles distant, and the still more curious telephone which enables a man to speak at one point of time and be heard when not only his name, but even his nation, it may be, is forgotten. Some thirty years ago or more a very curious little book was published, entitled "The Stars and the Earth," in which it was shown how, if an eye could be imagined riding on a ray of light reflected from an opening flower and passing on it through endless space and time, such an eye would always see that flower as it was in the same momentary phase of opening in which it appeared at the time that ray was first reflected from it, and would so see it to all eternity, whereas if it travelled the least bit faster, so as to overtake—say, in a thousand years—the ray which left the flower a minute sooner, that eye would be reading backwards the change which we see accomplished in a minute, but would have it spread and subdivided over the period of a thousand years. In the same
