The Empress of Russia, with her own hand, minuted an edict for universal tolerance.

Gentlemen,—At the close of my last lecture I asserted that the bruit of the heart does not reside in the organ itself, that is to say, is not produced by any mechanism in the interior of the heart, or by a concurrence of circumstances independent of the surrounding organs. I showed you this clearly in the heart of the swan, whose sternum we removed. Upon opening the pericardium and placing the ear close to the heart, or even employing the stethoscope, no bruit or sound of any kind was to be distinguished.

So I handed out lyrics by Allan Sherman, the shticky 1960s parody writer who my father revered and channeled to the end.

It had been nearly 50 years before, in 1888–1898, that Armstrong first tangled with the ionists' ideas and, as Dolby comments, he was “an extreme individualist, who would never yield to the social pressures of a scientific community […]