From th,. London Quarterly Review. VENTRILOQUISM.
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The art of the ventriloquist is well known: it consists in making his auditors believe that words and sounds proceed from certain per sons and certain objects in his vicinity, while they are uttered by himself: and it is founded on that property of sound in virtue of which the human ear is unable to judge with any accuracy of the direction ih which sounds reach it. This incapacity of the ear is the fertile source of many of those false judge ments which impress supernatural charac- ter upon sounds that have fixed lccality and phy scal origin. We know of case, where a sort of hollow musical sound, originating within three or four feet of the ears of two persons in bed, bafi1ed for mouths every at tempt to ascertain it's cause. Sometimes it seemed to issue from the roof, sometimes from neighboring apartment. but never from the spot from which it really came. Its supposed localities were carefully examined, but no cause for its production could be ascer- tained Though it was always heard by beth persons together it was never heard when A alcne was in the apartment, and the time of it's occurrence depended on the presence of B. This connected it with his destiny, and the imagination was not slow in turning the disco very to its own purposes. An event, howev- CT, which might never have occurred in the lifetime of either party, revealed the real cause of the sound, the locality of which was never afterwards mistaken.

 In order to understand what part this inde- cison of the ear performs in the feats of the vantriloqust, let the reader suppose two men placed before him in the open air, at the dis dance of one hundred feet, and standing close together. If they speak in succession, and if he does not know their voices, or see their lips move, he will be unable to tell which of them it is that speaks. If a man and a child are now placed so near the auditor that he can distinguish, without looking at them, the di- rection of the sounds which they utter, that is, whether the sound comes from the right or the left hand person, let the man be supposed capable of speaking in the voice of child when the man speaks in the language and the accents of the child, the auditor will suppose that the child is the speaker, although, his ear could distinguish, under ordinary circum- stances, that the sound came from the man. The knowledge conveyed to him by his ear is. in this case, made tu yield to the more for cible conviction that the language and accents of a child could only come fiom the child this conviction would be still further increas- ed if the child should use gestures, or accom- mediate his features to the childish accents uttered by the man. If the man were to sneak in his own character and his own voice, while the child exhibited the gestures and as- sumed features which correspond with the words uttered, the auditor might be little puzzlrd; but we> are persuaded that the ex- hibition made to the eye would overpowcr his other sources of knowledge, and that he would believe the accents of the man to be uttered