Excerpt from Some Questions of Phonetic Theory, Vol. 5: The Perception of Sound When in 2o I foretold a great fall for Helmholtz and his book I little suspected that the prophecy would be so soon fulfilled, by the publication of Sir Thomas Wright son's Inquiry into the Analytical Mechanism of the Internal Ear, 1918. Now the case is altered. The'wildemess in which I whispered to the reeds the oppressive secret hath - 's Ears has suddenly, through a feat of invisible engineering long since planned, become populous, and no less an anatomical authority than Professor Arthur Keith has proclaimed the crudity and impossibility of the Helmholtz theory of hearing. See The Times, March 22, 1919, p. 9. The present chapter underlines that proclamation, bringing linguistic proof that there cannot be any resonators in the internal ear acting like a kind of practical Fourier' S theorem.' The physicists (some of them) must be less superstitious. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.