468 
DARWINISM 
CHAP. 
of social life, their appreciation of music appears to rise in 
proportion; and we find among them rude stringed instruments 
and whistles, till, in Java, we have regular bands of skilled 
performers probably the successors of Hindoo musicians of 
the age before the Mahometan conquest. The Egyptians are 
believed to have been the earliest musicians, and from them 
the Jews and the Greeks, no doubt, derived their knowledge 
of the art; but it seems to be admitted that neither the latter 
nor the Romans knew anything of harmony or of the essential 
features of modern music. 1 Till the fifteenth century little 
progress appears to have been made in the science or the 
practice of music; but since that era it has advanced with 
marvellous rapidity, its progress being curiously parallel with 
that of mathematics, inasmuch as great musical geniuses 
appeared suddenly among different nations, equal in their 
possession of this special faculty to any that have since 
arisen. 
As with the mathematical, so with the musical faculty, 
it is impossil >le to trace any connection between its possession 
and survival in the struggle for existence. It seems to have 
arisen as a result of social and intellectual advancement, not 
as a cause ; and there is some evidence that it is latent in the 
lower races, since under European training native military 
bands have been formed in many parts of the world, which 
have been able to perform creditably the best modern music. 
The artistic faculty has run a somewhat different course, 
though analogous to that of the faculties already discussed. 
Most savages exhibit some rudiments of it, either in drawing 
or carving human or animal figures; but, almost without 
exception, these figures are rude and such as would be 
executed by the ordinary inartistic child. In fact, modern 
savages are, in this respect hardly equal to those prehistoric 
men who represented the mammoth and the reindeer on pieces 
of horn or bone. With any advance in the arts of social life, 
we have a corresponding advance in artistic skill and taste, 
rising very high in the art of Japan and India, but culminating 
in the marvellous sculpture of the best period of Grecian 
history. In the Middle Ages art was chiefly manifested in 
1 See “History of Music,” in Eng. Cyc., Science and Arts Division. 
