i'ULSE AND RIITTIIM. 425 



PULSE AND EHYTliar. 



By MARY UALLOCK, 



PHILADELPHIA, PA. 



THE close connection between pulse and rhythm has been specu- 

 lated upon since the fourth century before Christ. Herophile, 

 Avicenna, Savonarola, Saxon, Fernel and Samuel Hafen-Kefferus have 

 successively conjectured that the rhythmic phenomenon of pulse is in 

 some way responsible for our sense of ' beat.' The speculation w^as 

 fascinating. It could not become convincing without the help of 

 data capable of being furnished only by very recently invented instru- 

 ments and by recently accumulated knowledge. 



A sense of rhythm, probably due to instinct, is found well developed 

 low down in the animal series.* This fact is significant when one 

 considers that the theory usually advanced and accepted is that physical 

 activities of a regularly recurrent nature have created this sense in 

 man. The beat of the pestle used by primitive man to crush grain, the 

 blows of the flail, the rhythm of the quern and the spinning wheel, 

 the rock of the cradle, and in short the entire series of industries 

 where a regular beat or reciprocal motion suggests alternate action have 

 been put forward as the probable origin of the dance, musical and 

 verbal rhythm, and at length of the beat of music, f 



Tempting as is this theory which associates the origin of rhythm 

 with the development of ordered human activity, a rhythmic sound, 

 call or cry is first found coexistent with the first complete circulatory 

 system, heart with valves and blood vessels. This first appears in the 

 insect family and there too, in the saltoria of the orthoptera (com- 

 monly known as crickets, grasshoppers and locusts) appears this con- 

 junction of hearing, ability to call or stridulate, a nervous system and 

 valvular heart. The common existence of these phenomena does not 

 prove that the beat of the rudimentary insect heart led to rhythm, but 

 it suggests, at least, that this combination has been subjectively fruit- 

 ful of recurrent sound as a form of sexual and probably of pleasurable 

 activitv. 



Mr. S. H. Scudder has put down the songs of these little creatures in 

 musical notation,! giving them after careful consideration the attribute 

 of rhythm. Unfortunately the circulatory system of the insect world 



* ' Descent of Man,' Darwin, D. Appleton & Co., p. 566. 



t ' Rliythmus nnd Arbeit.' Karl Biicher, passim. 



J 'The Songs of the Grasshoppers,' Am. Nat., Vol. II., p. 113. 



