NOISE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3203, 4 October 1881, Page 4

NOISE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.

The ordinary human being loveg noise, especially when he makes it himself.; Our ancestors loved it. How fearfully noisy must England have been in the middle ages ! Everything public was appointed to be done " ove minstraulxcie," and they seem to have thought nothing particular of it. But that was before Helmholtz ; it Was not known then that " noises are the concomitants of the stimulation of fibres having their terminals in the outer portions of the labyrinth of the ear, and that if these stimulations be long continued, they so waste the tissues as to become unbearable." Many a man who would not bate yo\i one shriek of his whistle, or one bang of his drum, for your telling him that the noise made you ill, would be deeply affected if you talked Helmholtz to him. We know a case in point. Our poor friend Perm lived next door to Mr Wapshott, in a London suburb. Mr Wapshott's boys rose and yelled in their garden as early as 5.30 in fine weather, and his girls practised at all hours. Perm had to send in to implore one of them, who had been playing " Sound the loud timbrel" •with one hand for five months, to drop it at 11.45 p.m. Perm, however, was, and is, highly tolerant in the matter of music—he does not object to scales, for example, because he knows what is coming. He did object te "roosters " so placed as to wake him at every hour of the night, and he spoke to Mr Wapshott about them. Mr Wapshott snorted, and asked what difference a few yards of distance could make, if he removed them lower down in his garden. Perm took down Dr Arnott, and expounded to him the law of acoustics in that regard. Mr Wapshott replied, " Why, sir, my eldest son sleeps right over those birds, and he never complains." "Oh ! " said Perm, "is that the one that is reading for an examination ? " "Yes," replied Mr Wapshott proudly. "Then," -said Perm, if your son sleeps through all that confounded crowing, he'll be plucked, sir!" I his made matters hot. The next time Mrs Perm met Mra Wapshott, she treated her with melancholy hauteur. After some fencing, Mrs Wapshott inquired if she was ill. " Well, yes, really lam unwell! Your fowls are disintegrating my husband's tissues at such, a rate, that I am worn out with anxiety." Mrs Wapshott turned pale, or, as she would say, pallid. " Disintegrating Mr Perm's tissues ?"' she asked, and was visibly affected. " I'm quite sure," said she, " that Mr Wapshott would be the last man to be a party to disintegrating tissues. We live in a Christian country." And that night the roosters ■■ were removed. But the young man was plucked all the same when the time came. There is a difference even among good brains m the capacity of standing noise, but, after all, the line must be drawn somewhere. The Countess Brownlow tells us that Castlereagh could write or study in the midst of draw-ing-room clatter; but then we all know ■what sort of man he was. Earl Bussell eaye that Caetlereagh once spoke for an hour without conveying the least i idea of what he was driving at, and then calmly added, "Such, Mr Speaker, is tb,e law. of nations." The power of enduring mere talk depends largely upon your despising it. But who can despise a crowing cock, or the beat of a drum, or the discharge of cannon P There is no ratio in the case. Besides, even Castlereagh hud to give in-once, and inarch off with his papers to a quiet room. " Our noise seems to have disturbed you last night ?" asked the Countess Brownlow. "Yes," said Caetlereagh, with an important smile, " I was writing the , metaphysics of politics." He had to draw the line. Mrs Somerville, again, could study amid ordinary talk, but nobody ever tried her with thirteen whistles and four drums. If we could only popularise the idea that noise is really injurious to health—that, in fact, it disintegrates tissue—we might get this eubject attended to, and there would be tome chance of. the co-intelligence and cooperation necessary for the taking of measures to diminish noise,—Speotator,