Introduction.

Although the theory of aerial vibrations has been treated by more than one generation of mathematicians and experimenters, comparatively little has been done towards obtaining a clear view of what goes on in any but the more simple cases. The extreme difficulty of anything like a general deductive investigation of the question is no doubt one reason. On the other hand, experimenters on this, as on other subjects, have too often observed and measured blindly without taking sufficient care to simplify the conditions of their experiments, so as to attack as few difficulties as possible at a time. The result has been vast accumulations of isolated facts and measurements which lie as a sort of dead weight on the scientific stomach, and which must remain undigested until theory supplies a more powerful solvent than any now at our command. The motion of the air in cylindrical organ-pipes was successfully investigated by Bernoulli and Euler, at least in its main features; but their treatment of the question of the open pipe was incomplete, or even erroneous, on account of the assumption that at the open end the air remains of invariable density during the vibration. Although attacked by many others, this difficulty was not finally overcome until Helmholtz, in a paper which I shall have repeated occasion to refer to, gave a solution of the problem under certain restrictions, free from any arbitrary assumptions as to what takes place at the open end. Poisson and Stokes have solved the problem of the vibrations communicated to an infinite mass of air from the surface of a sphere or circular cylinder.