The figure looks altogether too much like one form of Mr. Hughes' microphone to allow of its use in an article intended to establish the novelty of Mr. Hughes' discovery. The omissions from the text are quite as significant. Under the first cut used in _Engineering_, Mr. Prescott says: "In the latest form of transmitter which Mr. Edison has introduced the vibrating diaphragm is done away with altogether, it having been found that much better results are obtained when a rigid plate of metal is substituted in its place.... The inflexible plate, of course, merely serves, in consequence of its comparatively large area, to concentrate a considerable portion of the sonorous waves upon the small carbon disk or button; a much greater degree of pressure for any given effort of the speaker is thus brought to bear on the disk than could be obtained if only its small surface alone were used." The _Engineering_ writer coolly suppresses this important statement. He does worse: he puts in its place the false statement that "the essential principle of Mr. Edison's transmitter consists in causing a diaphragm, vibrating under the influence of sonorous vibrations, to vary the pressure upon, and therefore the resistance of, a piece of carbon," and so on. A little further on, while repeating Mr. Edison's account of the experiments which led to the abandonment of the vibrating diaphragm (page 226 of Mr. Prescott's book), the _Engineering_ writer drops out the following remark by Mr. Edison: "I discovered that my principle, unlike all other acoustical devices for the transmission of speech, did not require any vibration of the diaphragm--that, in fact, the sound waves could be transformed into electrical pulsations without the movement of any intervening mechanism." Worse yet, in the very face of Mr. Edison's assertion to the contrary--an assertion which he could not by any possibility have overlooked--this most unscientific journalist says: "Mr. Edison finds it necessary to insert a diaphragm in all forms of his apparatus, that being the mechanical contrivance employed by which sonorous vibrations are converted into variations of mechanical pressure, and by which variations in the conductivity of the carbon or other material is insured.... On the other hand, Mr. Hughes employs no diaphragm at all, the sonorous vibrations in his apparatus acting directly upon the conducting material or through whatever solid substance to which they may be attached."