posting leagues, this must be fully equal to
the Waterloo distance. It has been urged, in
objection to this narrative, that the
intervening mountains would cut off the sound;
but it may very well be that the sound
travelled through the valley of the Rise, walled
in by mountains on both sides, and that
the pulsations of the air were thus driven
onward as along a trough. On Sunday,
the 8th of August, 1858, a gentleman was
walking, after morning service, near the
Fort Field at Sidmouth, in Devon. A
rumbling sound, like that of thunder, or
great guns, was more or less audible for
some time, and attracted his attention. As
the sky was without a cloud, he could scarcely
attribute it to thunder; and, as it was
Sunday, and there was no fleet at that
time in Torbay, he did not know how to attribute
it to guns. Others, however, who also
heard the sound, asked whether it might
not come from Cherbourg? It was known
that Queen Victoria had been visiting the
Emperor at Cherbourg; and it afterwards
transpired that, on Sunday, the 8th, after
the Queen had departed, the Emperor
embarked on board the line-of-battle ship
Bretagne, for Brest, and was saluted by
the ships and batteries at Cherbourg. If
this was the sound heard at Sidmouth, it
must have travelled a good hundred and
ten miles. On the "Glorious First of
June," 1794, when Howe defeated the
French fleet off Ushant, persons on the
south coast of Cornwall heard a distant
and long-continued noise of cannon; sea-
faring men declared that there must be a
naval action going on somewhere; and
when the news of Howe's victory reached
England, there was a general concurrence
of belief that the English and French
guns had produced the sound which had
been heard. The distance from the Cornish
coast to Ushant is about equal to that from
Sidmouth to Cherbourg.

Still greater distances remain to be
mentioned. Guns fired at Carlskrona were
on one occasion heard across the southern
extremity of Sweden, and then across the
strait called the Sound, to Denmark: a
distance very little short of a hundred and
twenty miles. In 1855, when a gentleman
was riding with a naval officer near the
north coast of Norfolk, the latter stopped,
and said, "Listen! the fleet saluting in the
Downs before it sails for the Baltic!" He
counted the number of guns which denotes
an admiral's salute. It was the day and
hour when Sir Charles Napier started with
the Baltic fleet, in the second year of the
war with Russia. During the late civil
war in America, the noise of the firing at
the battle of Gettysburg is said to have
been heard at Greensbury in Pennsylvania;
the distance between these places is nearly
a hundred and thirty miles, and there are
several spurs of the Alleghany Mountains
lying between them. Of course, when we
come to distances far exceeding this, great
caution must be observed in crediting the
stories we are told. Thus, in 1685, Dr.
Hearn, a physician in Sweden, is said to
have heard the firing of the guns which
announced the death of a member of the
royal family: the firing being at Stockholm,
and Dr.Hearn at a place a hundred
and eighty miles distance. It may be so;
but corroborative testimony seems to be
needed. Still more may we be allowed to
doubt whether the sound of a naval action,
fought between the English and the Dutch
in the German Ocean in 1674, was heard
at Shrewsbury, and on the confines of
North Wales, two hundred miles distant
from the scene of action.

As to meteorological and volcanic
phenomena, which lie beyond the limit of
man's control, it is scarcely possible to
guess the maximum distance to which
sounds will penetrate. When the meteor
or fire-ball of 1719 burst in the air, at a
height of nearly seventy miles above the
earth's surface, it sounded like a large
cannon, or even—as some said—a broadside.
When the great meteor of 1783,
half a mile in diameter, rushed along with
a speed of twenty miles a second, and at a
height of fifty miles, it gave out a sort of
hissing, rumbling sound. These distances
may not appear very great; but we must
bear in mind that, at such high altitudes,
the atmosphere is of extraordinary tenuity,
little fitted to convey any sonorous impulses
whatever. Geologists and physical
geographers have placed upon record the fact
that, in 1815, the Tomboro Mountain, in
the island of Sumbawa, was in a state of
volcanic activity from April to July; and
that on one particular day the noise of the
frightful convulsion was heard as far off
as Ternate, seven hundred miles, and even
at Sumatra, nine hundred miles distant in
the opposite direction. According to the
account given by Sir Stamford Raffles,
this must have been one of the most
terrible volcanic eruptions on record. Of
twelve thousand persons living on the
island, all were destroyed except a mere
handful. Hurricanes arose which carried
up into the air men and horses, as well as
trees uprooted from the ground. Lava
ashes fell in such prodigious abundance as