12 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



register: while speech continues to obey in a natural way the physiological laws 

 of emotion" (p. 117.) 



That in exaggerating and emphasizing the traits of emotional 

 speech, the singer should be led to make " conscious efforts " is 

 surely natural enough. What would Mr. Gurney have said of 

 dancing ? He would scarcely have denied that saltatory move- 

 ments often result spontaneously from excited feeling ; and he 

 could hardly have doubted that primitive dancing arose as a 

 systematized form of such movements. Would he have consid- 

 ered the belief that stage-dancing is evolved from these spontane- 

 ous movements to be negatived by the fact that a stage-dancer's 

 bounds and gyrations are made with " conscious efforts " ? 



In his elaborate work on The Power of Sound, Mr. Gurney, re- 

 peating in other forms the objections I have above dealt with, adds 

 to them some others. One of these, which appears at first sight to 

 have much weight, I must not pass by. He thus expresses it : 



" Any one may convince himself that not only are the intervals used in 

 emotional speech very large, twelve diatonic notes being quite an ordinary skip, 

 but that he uses extremes of both high and low pitch with his speaking voice, 

 which, if he tries to dwell on them and make them resonant, will be found to lie 

 beyond the compass of his singing voice " (p. 479). 



Now the part of my hypothesis which Mr. Gurney here combats 

 is that, as in emotional speech so in song, feeling, by causing mus- 

 cular contractions, causes divergences from the middle tones of 

 the voice, which become wider as it increases ; and that this fact 

 supports the belief that song is developed from emotional speech. 

 To this Mr. Gurney thinks it a conclusive answer that higher 

 notes are used by the speaking voice than by the singing voice. 

 But if, as his words imply, there is a physical impediment to the 

 production of notes in the one voice as high as those in the other, 

 then my argument is justified if, in either voice, extremes of feel- 

 ing are shown by extremes of pitch. If, for example, the cele- 

 brated ut de poitrine with which Tamberlik brought down the 

 house in one of the scenes of William Tell, was recognized as ex- 

 pressing the greatest intensity of martial patriotism, my position 

 is warranted, even though in his speaking voice he could have 

 produced a still higher note. 



Of answers to Mr. Gurney 's objections the two most effective 

 are suggested by the passage in which he sums up his conclusions. 

 Here are his words : 



" It is enough to recall how every consideration tended to the same result ; 

 that the oak grew from the acorn ; that the musical faculty and pleasure, which 

 have to do with music and nothing else, are the representatives and linear descend- 

 ants of a faculty and pleasure which were musical and nothing else ; and that, 

 however rudely and tentatively applied to speech, Music was a separate order' 1 ' 1 

 (p. 492). 



