Page 22 - The Master Handbook Of Acoustics

EPIGRAPH

Directly or indirectly, all questions connected with this subject must
come for decision to the ear, as the organ of hearing; and from it there
can be no appeal. But we are not therefore to infer that all acoustical
investigations are conducted with the unassisted ear. When once we
have discovered the physical phenomena which constitute the founda-
tion of sound, our explorations are in great measure transferred to
another field lying within the dominion of the principles of Mechanics.
Important laws are in this way arrived at, to which the sensations of
the ear cannot but conform.

Lord Raleigh in The Theory of Sound,
First Edition 1877.
(Also in first American edition, 1945,
courtesy of Dover Publications Inc.)

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