Our professor, having discarded the assistance of life and the spirit, dabbles in matter pure and undefiled. This process our young students are invited to attend. They carry their youth and their talent, their high hopes and aspirations, into the dissecting-room, where the spirit of the voice is supposed to reveal itself among the ghastliest spectacles. If a person of ordinary good sense, but not acquainted with these subjects, were to attend a lecture on the physiology of the voice and then attend a singing-lesson based upon the knowledge thus attained, he would be apt to remark: "Can this performance possibly be meant to be in good faith? Is not this man taking advantage of the credulity of this woman, who is giving him her hard-earned money, but to find before long that she has been beggared, not only in purse, but in voice and spirit as well; that she has not been benefited in any sense, but sadly robbed and betrayed?" The persistency with which the modern scientist attempts to hammer a voice out of the larynx and surrounding material tissues and other physical agencies is a cardinal sin against the holy "spirit." When he uses this supposed knowledge for coining it into money at the expense of trusting and aspiring singers, he commits a malpractice, for which some day he will have to go to the penitentiary of his own conscience; that is, if he is in possession of any. "Vocal bands, mucous membranes, tissues, ligaments, muscles, hollow spaces, air-pressure,"--these are the factors productive of the voice divine; matter, nought but matter; not a spark of the divine afflatus, not a spark even of life. Journals devoted to the voice are full of these things. I will quote but a single instance. At the Music Teachers' National Convention, held in New York, in June, 1898, a sensation was created by Dr. Frank E. Miller (see _Werner's Magazine_ for August, 1898, page 490) saying: "In other words, I wish to say that the action of the cavities or hollow spaces is anterior and prior to the action of the vocal bands in production of tone and tone-quality in our organs of speech. _With this novel fact I announce an original discovery._"