LITERARY NOTICES. 



847 



ment is conditioned by the forces acting 

 upon him from without. In Part II. we 

 have chapters on the " Origin of the Human 

 Race " ; " Prehistoric Relics " ; " Centers 

 of Creation " ; and " Dispersion of the Hu- 

 man Race." Finally, in Part III., the au- 

 thor treats of " The Development of the 

 Psychic Faculties " ; " The Development 

 of Language " ; and " The Development of 

 Civilization." Under the last-named head 

 are chapters on the development of reli- 

 gious and moral ideas, of social relations, 

 and of scientific and industrial activities. 



The Philosophy of Music. Being the Sub- 

 stance of a Course of Lectures deliv- 

 ered at the Royal Institution of Great 

 Britain in February and March, 1877. 

 By William Pole, F. R. S., etc. Bos- 

 ton : Houghton, Osgood & Co. 1879. 



It is doubtful whether the musical pub- 

 lic is in any degree aware of the revolution- 

 izing contribution which contemporary sci- 

 entific investigation is making to the theory 

 of music, building a solid structure where 

 before lay an interminable swamp of bad 

 logic, fanciful speculation, and impossible 

 metaphysics. Yet it was as long ago as 

 1863 that Helmholtz published his large 

 epoch-making work ("The Sensations of 

 Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory 

 of Music "). Mr. Ellis in 1875 furnished an 

 excellent English translation, adding several 

 learned appendices of his own ; and James 

 Sully, Grant Allen, and others have written 

 brief expository chapters and essays on 

 Helmholtz's theory. A few years ago a 

 society was organized in London for the 

 study and propagation of the new order 

 that had come into the complexities of musi- 

 cal theory. Mr. William Spottiswoode was 

 president. It was at the invitation of Mr. 

 Spottiswoode, as secretary of the Royal So- 

 ciety, that Mr. William Pole delivered at the 

 Royal Institution of Great Britain the lec- 

 tures on " The Philosophy of Music," which 

 now appear in the book of that title. 



This work for the first time places be- 

 fore the non-scientific reader a full, well- 

 proportioned, and easily followed exposition 

 of the new illumination which has fallen 

 upon speculative music. This is a most im- 

 portant task, and to have performed it so 

 well as Mr. Pole has done is a merit almost 

 equal to that of original investigation. For 



the subject is burdened with a mass of his- 

 torical and technical minutiae that required 

 the most careful sifting out of the non-es- 

 sential ; then came the task of leading the 

 uninitiated reader to entirely new concep- 

 tions, and of eradicating or directly invert- 

 ing many old and long-established ones. 

 Altogether a more trying subject for the ex- 

 pository art could not have been found, and 

 it is not too much to say that the musical 

 reader may find in these twenty-one orderly 

 chapters something beyond their subject- 

 matter, viz., an excellent illustration of the 

 systematizing and clarifying influence that 

 scientific methods may have upon mental ac- 

 tivity. 



The author, preparing the way with a 

 chapter on elementary acoustics, states the 

 phenomena of overtones, and then shows 

 their action in determining the tone-charac- 

 ter or timbre of the various musical instru- 

 ments. These overtones also constitute the 

 natural basis for the scales, for melody, 

 tonality, and harmony in so far as these 

 have a natural basis. For aesthetical influ- 

 ences, local, individual, and transitory, have 

 played the largest part in giving to music 

 its present form. The problem is to deter- 

 mine the parts played, on the one hand, by 

 physical or physiological principles, on the 

 other by aesthetical requirements, in that 

 artistic growth which has from the simple 

 Greek tetrachord developed modern music 

 in all its complexity. 



As to the origin of the diatonic scale, 

 following Helmholtz always, the author be- 

 lieves the octave and its primary division 

 into fifth and fourth to have arisen from the 

 natural structure of a musical sound, which 

 by its overtones embraces these three in- 

 tervals. The octave, with its fifth and fourth, 

 admitted of seven different divisions, the 

 seven Greek modes. From these the re- 

 quirements of early ecclesiastical music eli- 

 minated two modes, leaving five. The com- 

 ing of harmony, under Palestrina, removed 

 three more modes, unsuitable because of 

 their paucity in concords ; and the remain- 

 ing two survive as our modern major and 

 minor.* This gradual change, a genuine 



* In showing this eliminative process an un- 

 fortunate mistake is made on page 134, the rep- 

 etition of which on the following page seems to 

 give it some weight. D forma with G not a per- 

 fect fifth, but a perfect fourth. 



