The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical: A Cabinet for the CuriousStauffer, Frank H.
History
The Queer, the Quaint and the Quizzical: A Cabinet for the Curious
Stauffer, Frank H.
Literary curiosa
In the gardens of Les Rochas, which was the residence of Madame de
Sevigne, is a remarkable echo which finely illustrates the conducting
and reverberating powers of a flat surface. The chateau is situated near
the old town of Vitre. A broad gravel walk on a dead flat conducts
through the garden to the house. In the centre of this, on a particular
spot, the listener is placed at the distance of about ten or twelve
yards from another person, who, similarly placed addresses him in a low
and, in the common acceptation of the term, inaudible whisper, when,
"Lo! what myriads rise!" for immediately, from thousands and tens of
thousands of invisible tongues, starting from the earth beneath, or as
if every pebble was gifted with powers of speech, the sentence is
repeated with a slight hissing sound, not unlike the whirling of small
shot through the air. On removing from this spot, however trifling the
distance, the intensity of the repetition is sensibly diminished, and
within a few feet ceases to be heard. Under the idea that the ground was
hollow beneath, the soil has been dug up to a considerable depth, but
without discovering any clue to the solution of the mystery.
An echo in Woodstock Park, Oxfordshire, repeats seventeen syllables by
day and twenty by night. One on the bank of the Lago del Lupo, above the
fall of Terni, repeats fifteen. The most remarkable echo known is one
on the north side of Shipley church, in Sussex, which distinctly repeats
twenty-one syllables. In the Abbey church at St. Albans is a curious
echo. The tick of a watch may be heard from one end of the church to the
other. In Gloucester Cathedral a gallery of an octagonal form conveys a
whisper seventy-five feet across the nave.
In the Cathedral of Girgenti, in Sicily, the slightest whisper is borne
with perfect distinctness from the great door to the cornice behind the
high altar, a distance of two hundred and fifty feet. In the whispering
gallery of St. Paul's, London, the faintest sound is faithfully conveyed
from one side of the dome to another, but is not heard at any
intermediate point.
In the Manfroni Palace at Venice is a square room, about twenty-five
feet high, with a concave roof, in which a person standing in the centre
and stamping gently with his foot on the floor, hears the sound repeated
a great many times; but as his position deviates from the centre, the
reflected sounds grow fainter, and at a short distance wholly cease. The
same phenomenon occurs in a large room of the library of the Museum at
Naples.
_Moving Gods._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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