APPENDIX. 129 



Music in Nature. — Contin. 



Any expression of doubt as to the existence of music in 

 Nature was sure to be promptly met by our author. On 

 one occasion he burst out, " That sort of talk should come 

 only from the fellows that find their cuckoo music in the 

 top of a Dutch clock. The trombone blasts of the peacock 

 are in melodic steps, the horse uses both the diatonic and 

 the chromatic scale, and the ass jerks out his frightful 

 salute in perfect octaves.^ All things have music in the 

 rough, from the insect with a fiddle on its back^ up to 

 behemoth." 



Carlyle says that the heart of Nature is music, and 

 Niagara,^ Mammoth Cave,* the sonorous sands and musical 

 stones seem to bear him out. Illustrations of music in 

 Nature are to be found in a paper " On Melody in 

 Speech " ^ by Dr. F. Weber (an English organist) : 



^ The vocal skill of the horse and of the ass are united, it seems, in a 

 four-footed singer from afar. " An ape, one of the Gibbons, produces aa 

 exact octave of musical sounds, ascending and descending the scale by 

 half-tones ; so that this monkey ' alone of brute mammals may be said 

 to sing.' " — Darwin. 



2 This expression suggested the design on the cover of the present 

 volume. Reverse it, and we have a fair description of what old Father 

 Kircher found on an antique gem and transferred to the title-page of 

 the Musurgia. The old music-loving monk being the first, so far as we 

 know, to write down the bird songs, it has seemed proper to link to him, 

 by this pretty badge, the last lover of music and Nature to busy himself 

 in the same delightful sort of reporting. The broken harp and the sing- 

 ing insect may well be perpetuated as the emblem of the guild. 



3 Niagara. 'See Thayer, E. M. : Music of Niagara. (Scribner's Mag., 

 vol. xxi., 1880, pp. 583-586.) 



* Mammoth Cave, Music in the, in Litt. Liv. Age, vol. Ixviii., 1861, 

 p. 289. 



5 Music in Speech, in Philos. Trans., vol. ii., p. 441. Same article ia 

 Litt. Liv. Age, vol. 1., 1856, p. 228. 



9 



