HISTORY OF MUSICAL SCALES. 439 



or tublc of a .stringed instrument, and con.spicuoiisly in the scries of 

 holes on flutes and primitive oboes, while a sense of balance and sym- 

 metry added to the repetition appears in the two groups of holes on the 

 flutes, etc., and especially in the resonators, and appears in a different 

 way in the trapezoidal forms of dulcimers. Pan's pipes, and marimbas. 

 The pitch-determining- elements are therefore primarily decorative. 

 In fact no one can examine any collection of primitive wind instru- 

 ments, or drawings of them, without beiug struck by the way in w^hich 

 the lioles often cooperate in the decoration; while they are not found 

 interfering with the artistic design (see fig. 3, page 430; Plate 2, figs. 1 

 and 1>; Plate 3, fig. 2). 



Simple decoration involving only repetition and symmetrical placing 

 or grouping of similar parts is not only found among living primitive 

 peoples everywhere that musical instruments embodying a scale can 

 be found, but is prehistoric. The prehistoric flutes are believed to 

 come from the neolithic age, and the potter}^ from this age shows a 

 nuiltitude of geometrical designs, some of which are collected in Wil- 

 son's Plates 19 and 20. The paleolithic age has furnished few geomet- 

 rical designs and no flutes or many-holed resonators. In applying such 

 decoration to the hollow bones of animals or human enemies, to the hol- 

 low reeds that Lucretius says whistle in the wind, or to gourds and sim- 

 ple pottery, nothing can be more natural than sometimes to perforate 

 the W' alls and to get a several-toned musical instrument as the result. So 

 although no conclusions regarding the mental operations of prehistoric 

 man can be absolutely certain, one feels a strong conviction that, as 

 with immature minds among us, art appealed first to the eye and later 

 to the ear; that beautv of material form incidentalh" furnished series 

 of sounds that could be repeated, and could give to the ear and the 

 mind the idea of the definite leaps or steps that Aristoxenus. countless 

 ages afterward, called the characteristic of music. (Of course rhvthm 

 in movement and in sound, are independent of the structure of an 

 instrument.) Any influence that may have been exerted on the estab- 

 lishment of scales by the songs of l>irds, b}^ the recognition of over- 

 tones in the sounds of the human voice, or by the production of har- 

 monics on the horn must have been limited and trivial. The principle 

 here presented is at any rate a vera- caimi^ and explains facts hitherto 

 unexplained; further, (1) it is extremely simple both in theory and 

 practice; (2) it is flexible, allowing of multifarious results in prac- 

 tice; (3) it is suggested by prehistoric instruments, supported by the 

 instruiuents of man}^ living primitive peoples and repeated!}^ con- 

 firmed by its survival in several instruments of peoples in an advanced 

 stage of musical culture. 



It onl}- remains to add, in order to prevent misunderstanding, that 

 the principle here set forth never appears as the dominating one among 

 peoples who are known to have had a theory of the scale. The Greek 



