NATURAL PHILOSOPHY. 195 



help him and interest his pupils. And the variety is secured upon a 

 small number of words; only 84, where the sentence is of 21 words. Mr. 

 A. Long lias also applied the principle to a machine in which the elements 

 are musical notes, as a suggestive help in composition. Sir Walter 

 Scott suggested that such a contrivance might be used in writing sub- 

 ordinate parts of novels; and Swift described the very thing as seen by 

 Gulliver at Laputa. But the Laputans got philosophy out of the chance 

 combination : while the author gets only exercises in grammar. 



ORIGIN OF THE SIGNS + AND . 



A recent writer in the London Athenceum, gives the following as the 

 origin of the signs -|- and . He says : The first of these signs is a con- 

 traction of et. The course of transformation from its original to its 

 present form may be clearly traced in old MSS. Et by degrees became 

 &, and & became -J-. The origin of the second ( ) is rather more sin- 

 gular. Most persons are aware that it was formerly the universal custom, 

 both in writing and printing, to omit some or all of the vowels, or a 

 syllable or two of a word, and to denote such omissions by a short dash, 

 thus-, over the word so abbreviated. The word minus thus became 



contracted to mns, with a d-ish over the letters. After a time the short 

 line itself, without the letters, was considered sufficient to imply subtrac- 

 tion and by common consent became so used. Hence we have now the 

 two signs ^-j- and . 



MUSIC AS A PHYSICAL AND MORAL AGENT. 



The following thoughts respecting the physical and moral agency 

 of music are derived from an article communicated to the Atlantic 

 Monthly, for February, 1865, by Gottschalk, the eminent pianist. 



"Music may be objective and subjective in turn, according to the 

 disposition in which we find ourselves at the moment of hearing it. 

 It is objective when, affected only by the purely physical sensation of 

 sound, we listen to it passively, and it suggests to us impressions. 

 A march, a waltz, a flute imitating a nightingale, the chromatic scale 

 imitating the murmuring of the wind in the " Pastoral Symphony " 

 maybe taken as examples. 



"It is subjective when, under the empire of a latent impression, we 

 discover in its general character an accordance with our own psychol- 

 ogical state, and we assimilate it to ourselves ; it is then like a mir- 

 ror in which we see reflected the movements which agitate us with a 

 fidelity all the more exact from the fact that, without being conscious 

 of it, we ourselves are the painters of the picture which unrolls itself 

 before our imagination. Let me explain. Play a melancholy air to 

 a conscript thinking of his distant home; to a mother mourning the 

 loss of a child ; to a vanquished warrior; and be assured they will 

 all appropriate to themselves the plaintive harmonies, and fancy they 

 detect in them the accents of their own grief. 



"The fact of music is still a mystery. We know that it is composed 

 of three principles, air, vibration, and rhythmic symmetry. Strike an 

 object in an exhausted receiver, and it produces no sound, because 

 no air is there ; touch a ringing glass, and the sound stops, because 

 there is no vibration ; "take away the rhythm of the simplest air by 



