ABSTRACT
British mathematician and astronomer John Herschel was, arguably, mid-nineteenth-century Britain’s foremost scientific authority. For Herschel, sound’s communication worked in a similar fashion, and it was this idea that several leading British science writers would take up during the 1830s. To explain the nature and production of Sound, the laws of its propagation through the various media which convey it to our ears, and the manner of its action on those organs; the modifications of which it is susceptible in speech, in music, or in inarticulate and unmeaning noises; and the means, natural or artificial, of producing, regulating, or estimating them, are the proper objects of Acoustics. The diminution of the intensity of Sound in a rarefied atmosphere is a familiar phenomenon to those who are accustomed to ascend very high mountains. The deep silence of those elevated regions has a physical cause, independent of their habitual solitude.
