At the meeting of the British Association in 1876 Sir W. Thomson gave the following account of the performance of this instrument at the Philadelphia Exhibition:—“In the Canadian department” (for Professor Bell was not at the time an American citizen) “I heard ‘To be or not to be—there’s the rub,’ through the electric wire; but, scorning monosyllables, the electric articulation rose to higher flights, and gave me passages taken at random from the New York newspapers:—‘S. S. Cox has arrived’ (I failed to make out the ‘S. S. Cox’), ‘the City of New York,’ ‘Senator Morton,’ ‘the Senate has resolved to print a thousand extra copies,’ ‘the Americans in London have resolved to celebrate the coming Fourth of July.’ All this my own ears heard spoken to me with unmistakable distinctness by the thin circular disc armature of just such another little electro-magnet as this which I hold in my hand. The words were shouted with a clear and loud voice by my colleague judge, Professor Watson, at the far end of the line, holding his mouth close to a stretched membrane, carrying a piece of soft iron, which was thus made to perform in the neighbourhood of an electro-magnet, in circuit with the line, motions proportional to the sonorific motions of the air. This, the greatest by far of all the marvels of the electric telegraph, is due to a young countryman of our own, Mr. Graham Bell, of Edinburgh, and Montreal, and Boston, now about to become a naturalized citizen of the United States. Who can but admire the hardihood of invention which devised such very slight means to realize the mathematical conception that, if electricity is to convey all the delicacies of quality which distinguish articulate speech, the strength of its current must vary continuously, and as nearly as may be in simple proportion to the velocity of a particle of air engaged in constituting the sound?”