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Selections From the Breakfast-Table Series, and Pages From an Old Volume of Life
Selections From the BreakfastTable Series and Pages From an Old Volume of Life Author:Oliver Wendell Holmes General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1883 Original Publisher: Houghton, Mifflin Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you c... more »an select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: PAGES FROM AN OLD VOLUME OF LIFE. IV. THE PHYSIOLOGY OF WALKING. The two accomplishments common to all mankind are walking aud talking. Simple as they seem, they are yet acquired with vast labor, and very rarely understood in any clear way by those who practise them with perfect ease and unconscious skill. Talking seems the hardest to comprehend. Yet it has been clearly explained aud successfully imitated by artificial contrivances. We know that the moist membranous edges of a narrow crevice (the glottis) vibrate as the reed of a clarionet vibrates, and thus produce the human bleat. We narrow or widen or check or stop the flow of this sound by the lips, the tongue, the teeth, and thus articulate, or breakinto joints, the even current of sound. The sound varies with the degree and kind of interruption, as the " babble " of the brook with the shape and size of its impediments, -- pebbles, or rocks, or dams. To whisper is to articulate without bleating, or vocalizing; to coo as babies do is to bleat or vocalize without articulating. Machines are easily made that bleat not unlike human beings. A bit of India-rubber tube tied round a piece of glass tube is one of the simplest voice-uttering contrivances. To make a machine that articulates is not so easy ; but we remember Maelzel's wooden children, which said, " Pa-pa " and " Ma-ma " ; and more elaborate and successful speaking machines have, we believe, been since constructed. But no man has been able to make a figure that can laalk. Of all the automata imitating men or animals moving, there is not one in which t...« less