Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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It May Be Thought That, Even In Places Not Inhabited By Man, The Hum
Of Insects, The Song Of Birds, The Rustling Of Leaves Agitated By The
Feeblest Winds, Occasion During The Day A Confused Noise, Which We
Perceive The Less Because It Is Uniform, And Constantly Strikes The
Ear.
Now this noise, however slightly perceptible it may be, may
diminish the intensity of a louder noise; and this
Diminution may
cease if during the calm of the night the song of birds, the hum of
insects, and the action of the wind upon the leaves be interrupted.
But this reasoning, even admitting its justness, can scarcely be
applied to the forests of the Orinoco, where the air is constantly
filled by an innumerable quantity of mosquitos, where the hum of
insects is much louder by night than by day, and where the breeze, if
ever it be felt, blows only after sunset.
I rather think that the presence of the sun acts upon the propagation
and intensity of sound by the obstacles met in currents of air of
different density, and by the partial undulations of the atmosphere
arising from the unequal heating of different parts of the soil. In
calm air, whether dry or mingled with vesicular vapours equally
distributed, sound-waves are propagated without difficulty. But when
the air is crossed in every direction by small currents of hotter air,
the sonorous undulation is divided into two undulations where the
density of the medium changes abruptly; partial echoes are formed that
weaken the sound, because one of the streams comes back upon itself;
and those divisions of undulations take place of which M. Poisson has
developed the theory with great sagacity.* (* Annales de Chimie tome 7
page 293.) It is not therefore the movement of the particles of air
from below to above in the ascending current, or the small oblique
currents that we consider as opposing by a shock the propagation of
the sonorous undulations.
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