Rejecting this explanation, M. Langles, in his dissertation on the vocal statue of Memnon, and M. Salverte, in his work on the occult sciences, have ascribed the sounds entirely to Egyptian priestcraft; and have even gone so far as to describe the mechanism by which the statue not only emitted sounds, but articulated distinctly the intonations appropriate to the seven Egyptian vowels, and consecrated to the seven planets. M. Langles conceives that the sounds may be produced by a series of hammers, which strike either the granite itself, or sonorous stones like those which have been long used in China for musical instruments. M. Salverte improves this imperfect apparatus, by supposing that there might be adapted to these hammers a clepsydra, or water-clock, or any other instrument fitted to measure time, and so constructed as to put the hammers in motion at sunrise. Not satisfied with this supposition, he conjectures that the spring of all this mechanism was to be found in the art of concentrating the rays of the sun, which was well known to the ancients. Between the lips of the statue, or in some less remarkable part of it concealed from view by its height, he conceives an aperture to be perforated, containing a lens or a mirror capable of condensing the rays of the rising sun upon one or more metallic levers, which by their expansion put in motion the seven hammers in succession. Hence he explains why the sounds were emitted only at sunrise, and when the solar rays fell upon the mouth of the statue, and why they were never again heard till the sun returned to the eastern horizon. As a piece of mechanism, this contrivance is defective in not providing for the change in the sun’s amplitude, which is very considerable even in Egypt, for as the statue and the lens are both fixed, and as the sounds were heard at all seasons of the year, the same lens which threw the Midsummer rays of the sun upon the hammers could not possibly throw upon them his rays in winter. But even if the machinery were perfect, it is obvious that it could not have survived the mutilation of the statue, and could not, short of a miracle, have performed its part in the time of Sir A. Smith.