It is such _stuff_ as this that these people feed upon and believe in as revelations of great moment. Yet Dr. Miller and his coadjutors might sit before these cavities or hollow spaces till the end of time, looking, observing, probing, measuring, weighing, and determining their relation to the vocal bands and vice versa, and not a vestige of the spirit of the voice would ever make its appearance. The last conundrum of this kind, and it has special reference to my discoveries, is as follows: "May not the disturbance of speech known as stammering or stuttering be mainly a condition caused by the putting out of gear of one air-chamber in its relationship to other air-chambers, whereby the air-pressures during the speech-act are at war with one another, resulting in the well-known manifestations?" (_Werner's Magazine_ for September, 1898, page 59). Air-chambers and air-pressures again. I protest against being made _particeps criminis_ in any such proceeding. When we go back to the earliest recorded times and find traces of an attempt at expression by means of crude signs or figures impressed upon the clay, we can see more of the potentiality of a science (or a civilization) arising therefrom than we can from the teachings of the laryngoscopists, who claim that the voice can be evolved from the relations of various forms of matter to one another, without even a trace of the spirit accompanying them. Not many years since audiences of intelligent persons were invited to watch a dark tent in which two men were so closely tied together (as it was supposed) that they could not possibly move a limb. From this tent noises would arise as of the dragging of chains along the floor, bells ringing, etc., interposed now and then by a chair being flung through the air. All this was done by the "spirits." This was a proceeding not unlike the one now going on in the materialistic school in connection with the spirit of the voice. There is no more likelihood of the latter arising from the dark tent of the matter they are investigating than of a real spirit appearing in that other tent. The performance, besides, is not as amusing, no chairs being flung, etc. The audience is looking on gravely expectant, but all remains forever monotonously, solemnly, ominously, and cadaverously silent and resultless. The _living_ grain of corn a blind hen after much scratching succeeds in digging out from beneath a barn-yard floor bears a closer resemblance to life, and hence to the voice, than the relations a professor of physiology scratches together out of the various parts which he supposes make up the instrument of the voice. These attempts are so contrary to reason and common sense that in any other science their originators would be laughed to scorn for their pains.