the mode by which the responses of many of the oracles of former times were delivered by the priests and priestesses to the credulous multitude around them. And although this able writer has not fully succeeded in establishing his point, it must be allowed by every one that no art, while it continued occult, could better answer the purpose of such a sort of imposition; for an adept in the science is capable of modulating and inflecting his voice with so nice a dexterity, as not only to imitate, with equal accuracy, the cries of dogs, cats, infants, and persons in distress, together with every modification of articulate speech, but apparently to throw the mimic sound from whatever quarter he chooses: from the ceiling or roof of a house; the corner of a room; the mouths, stomachs, or pockets of any of the company present; from their hands or feet, from beneath a hat or a glass, or from a wooden doll. A humorous artist of this kind is said to have amused himself some years ago, by frequenting the fish-market at Edinburgh, and making a fish appear to speak, and give the lie to its vender in her own gross phrasing, upon her affirming that it was fresh, and caught in the morning; the fish quaintly replying as often as she so asserted, that it had been dead for a week, and that she knew it.

This singular art has given rise to a variety of extraordinary tales, and some of them of a very amusing kind. The following, which I copy from M. Bordeau, a learned critic of the sixteenth century, is of this description, and I will for once break through our accustomed gravity in order to give it you.

The gallant Francis I. of France, had an equally gallant and very shrewd valet de chambre, of the name of Lewis Brabant, who was also a most skilful ventriloquist. Lewis Brabant had the misfortune to fall desperately in love with a young, very beautiful, and very wealthy heiress, whose father forbad his addresses in consequence of the disparity of his condition. The father, however, died soon after, and the courageous lover, unsubdued by a first repulse, was determined to try his fortune a second time, under favour of the new state of circumstances, and to see whether it would not be possible, upon a severe push, to call to his aid the art of ventriloquism, in which he was so considerable an adept.

He accordingly waited upon the mother as soon as decency would allow, and once more submitted his proposals. But faithful to the views of her deceased husband, the mother of the young lady made no scruple of once more giving Lewis Brabant a direct refusal. While, however, she was in the act of doing so, a low, hollow, sepulchral voice was heard by herself, and by every friend who was with her, and which was instantly recognised as the voice of the deceased, commanding her to give her daughter's hand immediately to Lewis Brabant, whom the piteous spirit affirmed he now knew to be a most worthy and excellent man, and considerably wealthier than he had taken him to be when alive; adding, at the same time, that he was at that moment suffering a part of the pains of purgatory for having ill-treated, by his refusal, so exemplary a man; and that he would not be released from them till his widow had consented.

All was mute astonishment; but Lewis Brabant appeared more astonished than the rest. He modestly observed, that whatever his merits or his virtues might be, he had no idea that they were worthy of being commemorated by a voice from the grave; but that nothing could give him more pleasure than to be made the happy instrument of extricating the old gentleman from the pains of purgatory, which it seemed he was suffering on his account. There was no doubt as to the voice; and con

sequently there was no doubt as to the path to be pursued: the mother, the daughter, the whole family, immediately assented with one accord, and Lewis Brabant had the honour to receive their commands to prepare for the nuptials with all speed.

To prepare for the nuptials, however, required the assistance of a little ready money; but Lewis Brabant was destitute of such an article. It was necessary, nevertheless, to procure it; and he now resolved to try whether the same talent which had obtained for him the promise of a wife, might not also obtain for him the material he stood in need of.

He recollected that there lived at Lyons an old miserly banker of the name of Cornu, who had accumulated immense wealth by usury and extortion, and whose conscience appeared often to be ill at ease, in consequence of the means he had made use of; and it immediately struck him that M. Cornu was the very character that might answer his purpose.

To Lyons, therefore, he went instantly post-haste, commenced an immediate acquaintance with M. Cornu, and on every interview took especial care, on entering into conversation with him, to contrast the pure happiness enjoyed by the man whose conscience could look back, like M. Cornu's, as he was pleased to say, on a life devoted to acts of charity and benevolence, with the horrors of the wretch who had amassed heaps of wealth by usury and injustice, and whose tormented mind only gave him now a foretaste of what he was to expect hereafter. The miser was perpetually desirous of changing the conversation; but the more he tried, the more his companion pressed upon him with it; till finding, on one occasion, that he appeared more agitated than ever, the ventriloquist conceived such an occasion to be the golden moment for putting his scheme into execution; and at that instant a low, solemn, sepulchral mutter was heard, as in the former case, which was at last found to be the voice of M. Cornu's father, who had been dead for some years, and which declared him to have passed all this time in the tortures of purgatory, from which he had now just learned that nothing could free him but his son's paying ten thousand crowns into the hands of Lewis Brabant, then with him, for the purpose of redeeming Christian slaves from the hands of the Turks.

All, as in the last case, was unutterable astonishment; but Lewis Brabant was the most astonished of the two modestly declared that now for the first time in his life he was convinced of the possibility of the dead holding conversation with the living and admitted that, in truth, he had for many years been benevolently employed in redeeming Christian slaves from the Turks, although his native bashfulness would not allow him to avow it publicly.

The mind of the old miser was distracted with a thousand contending passions. He was suspicious without having any satisfactory reason for suspicion, filial duty prompted him to rescue his father from his abode of misery; but ten thousand crowns was a large sum of money even for such a purpose. He at length resolved to adjourn the meeting till the next day, and to change it to another place. He required time to examine into this mysterious affair, and also wished, as he told his companion, to give his father an opportunity of trying whether he could not bargain for a smaller sum.

They accordingly separated; but renewed their meeting the next day with the punctuality of men of business. The place made choice of by M. Cornu for this rencontre, was an open common in the vicinity of Lyons, where there was neither a house, nor a wall, nor a tree, nor a bush, that

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could conceal a confederate, even if such a person should be in employment. No sooner, however, had they met than the old banker's ears were again assailed with the same hideous and sepulchral cries, upbraiding him for having suffered his father to remain for four and twenty hours longer in all the torments of purgatory; denouncing that, unless the demand of the ten thousand crowns was instantly complied with, the sum would be doubled; and that the miser himself would be condemned to the same doleful regions, and to an increased degree of torture. M. Cornu moved a few paces forward, but he was assaulted with still louder shrieks: he ad-. vanced a second time, and now, instead of hearing his father's voice alone, he was assailed with the dreadful outcry of a hundred ghosts at once, those of his grandfather, his great grandfather, his uncles and aunts, and the whole family of the Cornus for the last two or three generations; who, it seems, were all equally suffering in purgatory-and were included in the general contract for the ten thousand crowns; all of them beseeching him in the name of every saint in the calendar to have mercy upon them, and to have mercy upon himself. It required more fortitude than M. Cornu possessed to resist the threats and outcries of a hundred and fifty or two hundred ghosts at a time. He instantly paid the ten thousand crowns into the hands of Lewis Brabant, and felt some pleasure that by postponing the payment for a day, he had at least been able to rescue the whole family of the Cornus for the same sum of money as was at first demanded for his father alone. The dexterous ventriloquist, having received the money, instantly returned to Paris, married his intended bride, and told the whole story to his sovereign and the court, very much to the entertainment of all of them.

It is certain, that hitherto no satisfactory explanation has been offered of this singular phænomenon; and I shall, therefore, take leave to suggest, that it is, possibly, of a much simpler character than has usually been apprehended; that the entire range of its imitative power is confined to the larynx alone, and that the art itself consists in a close attention to the almost infinite variety of tones, articulations, and inflections the larynx is capable of producing in its own region, when long and dexterously practised upon, and a skilful modification of these effects into mimic speech, passed for the most part, and whenever necessary, through the cavity of the nostrils, instead of through the mouth. The parrot, in imitating human language, employs the larynx and nothing else; as does the mocking-bird, the most perfect ventriloquist in nature, in imitating cries and intonations of all kinds.

But the parrot and the mocking-bird, it may, perhaps, be said, open their mouths, and employ their tongues, which the ventriloquist, on many occasions, docs not do; and that hence the organ of the tongue is equally necessary to inarticulate and to articulate language.

Such, I well know, is the general opinion; but it is an opinion opposed by a variety of incontrovertible facts, and facts of a most important and singular nature, though they have seldom been attended to as they deserve.

Every bird-breeder knows that it is not necessary for birds to open their bills in the act of singing, except for the purpose of uttering the note already formed in the larynx, that would otherwise have to pass through the nostrils, which, in birds, prove a much less convenient passage for sound than in man; and of so little use is the tongue towards the formation of sound, that instances are not wanting of birds that have continued their song after they have lost the entire tongue by accident or disease. But without dwelling upon these points, which are of subordinate consideration, I pass on to observe, and to produce examples, that it is not absolutely necessary for

man himself to be possessed of a tongue, or even of an uvula, for the purpose either of speaking or singing; or for that of deglutition or taste. In a course of physiological study, and in a lecture upon the nature and instruments of the voice, this is an inquiry, not only of grave moment, but immediately issuing from the subject before us.

*

Among almost innumerable instances of persons who have been able to articulate and converse without a tongue, too loosely recorded in ancient times to be fully depended upon, we occasionally meet with examples that are far better entitled to our credit. Such is the assertion of the emperor Justin, who affirms, that he had seen venerable men "whose tongues having been cut out at the root, complained bitterly of the torture they had suffered;" and who tells us, in, another place, of some others, upon whom Honorichius, king of the Vandals, had exercised the same barbarity; and who had, notwithstanding," perfectly retained their speech."t

Upon the irruption of the Turks into Austria, in 1683, this cruelty was again put in practice upon many of those who unfortunately fell into their hands. Tulpius, whose veracity no man will lightly impeach, was at this time informed that one of the sufferers had escaped, and had recovered, and was still in possession of the use of speech, and residing at Wesop, in Holland; and, half doubtful of the truth of the common report, to Wesop he immediately set off, to satisfy himself by a personal examination. He saw the man, and found that he could not only speak, but could articulate those consonants and words which seem chiefly to depend upon the tip of the tongue for their pronunciation. This is a case the more worthy of attention, because the man had been so cruelly mutilated at the roof of the mouth, that he could not swallow the smallest quantity of food, without thrusting it into the esophagus with his forefinger.‡

In the third volume of the Ephemerides Germanicæ, is another case of a similar kind, and most credibly authenticated. It relates to a boy that had lost his tongue at eight years of age by the small-pox, but was still able to speak. The boy was minutely examined in a full court before the members of the University of Saumur, in France, who had suspected some deception; the report, however, was found correct; and the University, in consequence, gave their official attestation to it, in order that posterity might have no room to doubt its validity.

To these let me add one more instance that occurred in our own country, in what may be almost called our own day, and which is very minutely detailed and authenticated in the Transactions of the Philosophical Society that were published between the years 1742 and 1747.§ The case, as drawn up by Dr. Parsons, relates to a young woman of the name of Margaret Cutting, of Wickham Market, near Ipswich, in Suffolk, who, when only four years old, lost the whole of her tongue, together with the uvula, from what is said to have been a cancerous affection; but who still retained the power of speech, deglutition, and taste, without any imperfection whatever; articulating, indeed, as fluently, and with as much correctness as other persons; and, like the individual whose history is given by Tullius, articulating those peculiar syllables which ordinarily require the express aid of the tip of the tongue for exact enunciation. She also sang to admiration, and still articulated her words while singing, and could

*Con. Tit. de Off. Præt.

Phil. Trans. 1742. p. 143; id. 1747. 621; in the Abridgment, viii. 586; ix. 375.
Tulpii Observ. Medica Amsterd.

In their abridged form, vol. viii. 586. and ix. 375.

form no conception of the use of a tongue in other people. Neither were her teeth, in any respect, able to supply the place of the deficient organs; for they were but few in number, and rose scarcely higher than the surface of the gums, in consequence of the injury to their sockets from the disease that had destroyed the tongue. The case thus introduced before the Royal Society, was attested by the minister of the parish, a medical practitioner of repute, and another respectable person. From its singularity, however, the Society evinced a commendable tardiness of belief. They requested another report upon the subject, and from another set of witnesses, whom they themselves named for the purpose; and for whose guidance they drew up a line of categorical examination. This second report soon reached the Society, and minutely coincided with the first ; and to set the question completely at rest, the young woman was shortly afterwards brought to London, and satisfied the Royal Society in her own person.*

It appears obvious, then, that the tongue, though a natural and common organ in the functions of voice, taste, and deglutition, is not absolutely necessary to these functions: that on various occasions it has been, and, therefore, may be, totally lost, while the functions themselves continue perfect.

In singing, every one knows that the larynx is the only organ employed, except when the tones are not merely uttered but articulated: it is the only organ employed, as I have already observed, in the mock articulations of parrots and other imitative birds; it is the only organ of all natural tones, or natural language; and hence Lord Monboddo ingeniously conjectures, that it is the chief organ of articulate language in its rudest and most barbarous state. "As all natural cries," he observes, “even though modulated by music, are from the throat and larynx, or part of the throat, with little or no operation of the organs of the mouth; it is natural to suppose that the first languages were, for the greater part, spoken from the throat; and that what consonants were used to vary the cries, were mostly guttural; and that the organs of the mouth would at first be but very little employed."t

I have thus endeavoured to account for the chief difficulty, and the most extraordinary phænomenon that occurs in the art of VENTRILOQUISM, that I mean of speaking without appearing to speak, on discovering any motion of the lips the larynx alone, by long and dexterous practice, and perhaps by a peculiar modification in some of its muscles, or cartilages, being capable of answering the purpose and supplying the place of the associate organs of the mouth.

It is this curious power, in the art of ventriloquism, that most astonishes us, and puts us off our guard; for the two other powers connected with it, of imitating various cries or voices, and of appearing to throw the voice from remote objects, are far more common and comprehensible. The power of vocal imitation where the tongue is allowed to be employed is possessed, by most persons, to a certain extent; and, by many, to a de

Stad. of Med. i. 499, Edit. i. where other examples are noticed.
Orig. and Progr. of Lang. vol. i. 6. iii. ch. 4.

According to M. Magendie, whose work first appeared in our own country seven years after the delivery of the above Lecture, in 1811, the larynx is supposed to be the organ chiefly or altogether operated upon in France; and ventriloquism to consist in adjusting the mea sure of its articulations according to the effects which the ventriloquist has observed that distance, or other circumstances, produce upon the natural voice. See Edin. Med. and Surg. Journ. Ixi. 577.