A
friendly laboratory had inducted him into many biologic mysteries.
Particularly fascinating to him was the tactile sense, that sense of
touch wherewith man acquaints himself with this earth-clot swimming in
space. Davos contemplated the tips of his fingers as he sat in the
grateful cool, his ten voices as he named them. With them he sang,
thundered, and thought upon the keyboard of his grand piano-forte. A
miracle, indeed, these slender cushions of fat, ramified by a network of
nerves, sinews, and bones as exquisite in their mechanism as the motion
of the planets. If hearing is a miracle, so is touch; the ear is not a
resonator, as has been so long maintained, but an apparatus which
records variations of pressure. This makes it subservient to the laws of
sensation; touch and hearing are akin. It aroused the pride of Davos
after he had read the revolutionary theories of Pierre Bounier regarding
the touch. So subtle could the art of touch be cultivated, the pianist
believed, that the blind could _feel_ colour on the canvas of the
painter.
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