Book Two

Not every one, however will easily credit this story. And so the following trick will perhaps be so ingenious as quite to surpass your belief: that you should enclose in a tube certain definite and distinctly uttered words, and that, after the lapse of a considerable time, to be measured by days, in a spot well removed from your original position, these words should be returned to you and be heard by you in the same order and with the same intervals as when spoken. On this principle you may even make a statue or a wooden representation of a mouth talk and return answers to your questions; and thus what would be a plaything for you, would be a source of wonder for men in general. So it is recorded in the books that Albertus Magnus constructed a talking head. There is no doubt that he produced this rare and wonderful thing through some one of the above-mentioned devices.” thus, Walch. Of the truth of Walch’s word, so far as they relate to the tube, I myself certainly had experience in the so-called Giants’ Hall of the Ducal Palace at Mantua, before the San Sebastian gate. I there saw two men standing in remote parts or corners of the hall and talking to each other by means of a tube of this sort, and with one of the two men I myself conversed in the same way, when I distinctly heard his voice. All this time not a sound of what was passing was heard by any one of those who stood in the space between. On a similar tube or small copper pipe,(1) hear Phillippus Camerarius, Hor. Subc. Cent., I.c.28, pp. 142, 143, who discourses thus, drawing his account from other authors (for this invention is not of so very recent date): “Also the wall, or rampart, of the Picts,–a wonderful piece of work built in former times by the Romans with marvelous skill, as a defence against the inroads of the barbarians after England had been reduced to a province,—is described by the same Camden(2) not less learnedly than elegantly and minutely. The Anglo-Saxon Bede (3) also makes mention of the wall and describes the place where its ruins are still to be seen. He(4) furthermore informs us of the time and manner of its destruction by the Picts and Scots. In the course of his account, he passes in review the traces and ruins of the wall, as they exist in many places, and says that at intervals of a mile there were forts–in all, a large number–let into the wall, the foundations of which are to be seen in places in the form of hewn blocks of stone, and that between these forts there were built towers, where were stationed soldiers to overawe the barbarians, and which served as posts for the Areani. These Areani, continues Camden, were a class of men employed by the ancients, whose duty it was, as Marcellinus says,(1) to run to and fro over vast stretches of country and give the alarm to our generals when the neighboring tribes threatened sudden attack. The natives also tell of a small copper pipe that was ingeniously fitted in to this wall and ran from tower to tower and from fort to fort; when at any one of the towers the voice was delivered into this pipe, the second was straightway carried without break to the next tower, and then to the next, and so on to the end of the line; the purpose of the device being to give information of the place where the attack of the enemy was apprehended. A similar wonderful invention is recorded in connection with the tower of Byzantium, by Xiphilinus in his epitome of Dio’s account of Severus.”(2) To this effect, Camerarius, drawing from Camden. Of what is said by Walch in regard to the confinement and transference of the voice, I have never yet seen a practical illustration. Porta, also, Mag. Nat., Bk.XVI.c.12, ad fin., writes doubtingly thereof although he records that he has heard it said of some lovers whose houses were far apart,