OUR INNER SELVES.

Southland Times, Issue 1015, 4 September 1868, Page 3

OUR INNER SELVES.

Fall the teas bottetd.]

The Chinese sword swallowers at the Paris Exhibition were extraordinary performers in their way, but at this epo6h of progress they have soon been distanced. Swallowing a sabre, at present, is nothing. The fashion now is to swallow a lighted lantern and brilliantly illuminate your inner man. You then become a living and walking gas light ; that is all. It is evident that swallowing a lantern is only one remove in advance of swallowing a sword. Now there happen to be little electric lanterns which give light without burning. They are called Gessler's tubes, and are small glass cylinders, either empty ov filled with azote, hydrogen, or carbonic acid gas, through which a voltaic current is made to pass. The tubes become sufficiently luminous to allow you to read printed letters held at several inches distance from them. When this miniature lantern is introduced into a stomach, the skin is transparent enough to permit your seeing the interior of the animal. There is no need for people to live in glass houses, for they are hereby transformed into glass houses themselves. Their domestic secrets are rudely divulged ; and Diogenes would be delighted to find that, instead of a mere superficial outside view of Ms- mueb desiderated honest mattj he can now, with a newly invented lantern, look a person through and through. The experiment, which may be considered exceedingly curious until something still more strange is started, is only an extended copy of what has been practised in medical art for some years past. For instance, there is the Ophthalmoscope, or Eye-inspector, of the German philosopher Helmholtz, a small instrument by means of which, the interior of the eye being lighted up, it is possible to explore successfully the deepest portions of that intricate organ. Other instruments assist in the examination of divers internal parts of the human body. Not the least remarkable of these inquisitive apparatuses is the Laryngoscope, invented by a German physician named Czermak for the inspection of the respiratory passages and the mechanism which produces the voice.

The vocal organ in man (which Dr Tyndall truly describes as the most perfect of reed instruments) is placed at the top of the wind-pipe, the head of which is adjusted for the attachment of certain elastic bands, called "vocal chords," which almost close the aperture. When the air from the lungs is forced through the slit which separates these vocal chords, they are thrown into vibration. By varying their tension, the rate of vibration is varied, and the sound changed in pitch. The sweetness and smoothness of the voice depend on the perfect closure of the slit of the glottis at regular intervals during the vibration. The vocal chords may be viewed in a mirror placed suitably at the back of the mouth. Dr Tyndall once attempted to project M. Czermak's larynx upon a screen in his lecture-room, but with only partial success. The organ may, however, be viewed directly in the Laryngoscope, its motions, both in singing, speaking, and coughing, being strikingly visible. The roughness of the voice in colds is due, according to the aforesaid Helmholtz (learned in acoustics), to mucous flocculi, which get into the slit of the glottis, and which are seen by means of the Laryngoscope. The squeaking falsetto voice vrith which some persons are afflicted, the same Helmholtz thinks may be produced by the drawing aside of the mocous layer which ordinarily lies under and loads the vocal chords. Their edges thus become sharper, and their weight less ; while their elasticity remaining the same, they are shaken into more rapid tremors. The promptness and accuracy with which the vocal chords can change their tension, their form, and the width of the slit between them, render the voice the most perfect of musical instruments. The order of the day, therefore, is that we should be able to see everything, without exception. If we can look an animalcule through and through by means of transmitted light ; if, in the same way, we can behold the blood circulating in the tail of a tadpole or the foot of a frog, with all the minute vessels thereto pertaining, why should, we not do so. with

larger animals, with our own proper selves ? It is merely a question of degree. "With a sufficient intensity tof illuminating power, there is no knowing what may not become transparent. And, in fact, a distinguished hygienist, M. Foussagrives, of Montpellier, attempted to render the internal viscera of our body visible by transmitted light. They were to be exhibited to bystanders as animated and most interesting transparencies. M. Bruk, a German medical man, followed up the same line of research. Finally, at the Medical Congress of 1867, M. Milliot, a French physician residing at Kiew, gave an approximate solution of the problem.