One of the very curious feats which I have performed with the phonograph is the conversion of the human voice into the sounds of various instruments. I had my wife sing the familiar Scotch ballad, "Comin' through the Rye," to the phonograph while the cylinder was rotating at the rate of about forty revolutions per minute. Each word in the song was distinctly pronounced and the music rendered in a plain, smooth tone. I then increased the speed of the machine to about one hundred and twenty per minute, at which rate I reproduced the song. It was a very perfect imitation of the bagpipe with no sign whatever of articulation. The melody was preserved with only a change of time. The speech character was so completely destroyed that I repeated this record to a large audience in which were several eminent musicians, not one of whom suspected that it was not a real bagpipe solo. In like manner I have converted the sounds of the voice into a very perfect piccolo, flute, fife, and into a fairly good imitation of a whistle sound. To produce the whistling effect and the fife sound the rate of speed must be necessarily very high, and some notes will not be perfectly converted for some reason which I have not yet fully understood. Some voices are much more easily converted into the flute effect than others. To get the best flute sounds, a full, smooth, mezzo-soprano gives the best effect. In reversing the operation, the sounds of these instruments can be made to imitate the human voice somewhat, but not exactly, not only in the fact that the modulation is wanting and there is no semblance to consonant sounds, but the tone itself differs in quality from that of the voice. [Sidenote: CONTOUR OF SOUNDS] Among other respects in which the vocal sounds of man and Simian resemble is in the contour of the sounds, which I have defined elsewhere. I have called attention to the fact that by reversing the cylinder of the phonograph and repeating the sound recorded thereon that a musical note or sound would repeat alike each way. Most of the sounds made by other animals do this, but those made by man and Simian alike show modulation, not, however, equally distinct. The notes of birds repeat alike both ways except their order is reversed. Again, to magnify the sounds as I have shown it can be done, allows you to inspect them, as it were, under the microscope, and this examination shows the contour of the sounds of these two genera to resemble.