Even in modern times, speaking-machines have been constructed on this principle. The figure is frequently a mere head placed upon a hollow pedestal, which, in order to promote the deception, contains a pair of bellows, a sounding-board, a cylinder and pipes supposed to represent the organs of speech. In other cases these are dispensed with, and a simple wooden head utters its sounds through a speaking trumpet. At the court of Charles II., this deception was exhibited with great effect by one Thomas Irson, an Englishman; and when the astonishment had become very general, a popish priest was discovered by one of the pages in an adjoining apartment. The questions had been proposed to the wooden figure by whispering into its ear, and this learned personage had answered them all with great ability, by speaking through a pipe in the same language in which the questions were proposed. Professor Beckmann informs us that children and women were generally concealed either in the juggler’s box or in the adjacent apartment, and that the juggler gave them every assistance by means of signs previously agreed upon. When one of these exhibitions was shown at Göttingen, the Professor was allowed, on the promise of secrecy, to witness the process of deception. He saw the assistant in another room, standing before the pipe with a card in his hand, upon which the signs agreed upon had been marked, and he had been introduced so privately into the house that even the landlady was ignorant of his being there. An exhibition of the very same kind has been brought forward in our own day, under the name of the _Invisible Girl_; and as the mechanism employed was extremely ingenious, and is well fitted to convey an idea of this class of deceptions, we shall give a detailed description of it. [Illustration: _Fig. 37._] The machinery, as constructed by M. Charles, is shown in fig. 37 in perspective, and a plan of it in Fig. 38. The four upright posts A, A, A, A, are united at top by a cross rail B, B, and by two similar rails at bottom. Four bent wires a, _a_, _a_, _a_, proceeded from the top of these posts, and terminated at _c_. A hollow copper ball M, about a foot in diameter, was suspended from these wires by four slender ribands _b_, _b_, _b_, _b_, and into the copper ball were fixed the extremities of four trumpets T, T, T, T, with their mouths outwards. [Illustration: _Fig. 38._]