from flower to flower.  Then a grasshopper will set up a chirp within a few yards of you, or, if all living creatures are silent, a brook not far off may be flowing along with a rippling musical sound.  These and a hundred other noises you will hear in the most quiet country spot; the lowing of the cattle, the song of the birds, the squeak of the field-mouse, the croak of the frog, mingling with the sound of the woodman’s axe in the distance, or the dash of some river torrent.  And beside these quiet sounds, there are still other occasional voices of nature which speak to us from time to time.  The howling of the tempestuous wind, the roar of the sea-waves in a storm, the crash of thunder, and the mighty noise of the falling avalanche; such sounds as these tell us how great and terrible nature can be.

Now, has it ever occurred to you to think what sounds is, and how it is that we hear all these things?  Strange as it may seem, if there were no creature that could hear upon the earth, there would be no such thing as sound, though all these movements in nature were going on just as they are now.

Try and grasp this thoroughly, for it is difficult at first to make people believe it.  Suppose you were stone-deaf, there would be no such thing as sound to you.  A heavy hammer falling on an anvil would indeed shake the air violently, but since this air when it reached your ear would find a useless instrument, it could not play upon it. and it is this play on the drum of your ear and the nerves within it speaking to your brain which make sound.  Therefore, if all creatures on or around the earth were without ears or nerves of hearing, there would be no instrument on which to play, and consequently there would be no such thing as sound.  This proves that two things are needed in order that we may hear.  First, the outside movement which plays on our hearing instrument; and, secondly, the hearing instrument itself.

First, then, let us try to understand what happens outside our ears.  Take a poker and tie a piece of string to it, and holding the ends of the string to your ears, strike the poker against the fender.  You will hear a very loud sound, for the blow will set all the particles of the poker quivering, and this movement will pass right along the string to the drum of your ear and play upon it.

Now take the string away from you ears, and hold it with your teeth.  Stop your ears tight, and strike the poker once more against the fender.  You will hear the sound quite as loudly and clearly as you did before, but this time the drum of your ear has not been agitated.  How, then, has the sound been produced?  In this case, the quivering movement has passed through your teeth into the bones of your hear, and from them into the nerves, and so produced sound in your brain.  And now, as a final experiment, fasten the string to the mantelpiece, and hit it again against the fender.  How much feebler the sound is this time, and how much sooner it stops!  Yet still it reaches you, for the movement has come this time across the air to the drums of your ear.