ABSTRACT
The Friday evening meetings of the season are brought to a close: the nineteenth and last of those intellectual treats was presented to us this evening in Mr. Faraday’s concluding discourse on the subject of Phonics. The simplicity of the Kaleidophone is as remarkable as the appearances it presents, are beautiful and surprising. A slender rod of highly tempered steel, tipped at one end with a brilliant spherule, is fixed at the other extremity in a sounding board – a violin bow is then drawn across the rod, when a musical tone is uttered, and the spherule is seen to describe some of the most fanciful and extraordinary curves, circles in every variety of combination and concatenation, ellipses, spirals “in wandering mazes lost,” – the bounding lines composed of minute and indefinable gyrations of fantastic tracery – description fails to convey any thing like an idea of their dazzling brilliancy and effect!.
