X.] IN ANIMALS AND MAN. 6^ 



Allen's extreme case proves that the perception of absolute 

 pitch is retained by civilized man ; for this individual distin- 

 guished high and low notes, although he could not perceive any 

 difference between the successive notes of the scale when he 

 played it. 



Hence the different degrees of imperfection in the musical 

 faculty seem to me to be traceable to defects in the structure of 

 the auditory organ, to a more or less complete degeneration from 

 its original and normal state. Defect and degeneration are, as 

 everyone knows, apt to occur in any part of the body, and 

 should occasion the least surprise in an organ which, like the 

 human ear, no longer plays a decisive part in the preservation 

 of the species,— a part which it must certainly have played ages 

 ago when man lived under more natural conditions. In such 

 times he needed a perfect ear just as wild animals need it now. 

 The civilized man of the present day no longer depends on the 

 acuteness and perfection of this sense ; it is, to a certain extent, 

 of no importance whether he has or has not the full number of 

 15,500 cells in his cochlea. But those persons in whom the 

 number or perhaps the minute structure of these cells is below 

 the average, or in whom the tension of the membranes is 

 abnormal, will probably be unable to perceive musical intervals 

 correctly or may be unable to perceive them at all ; such persons 

 are unmusical. 



I do not mean this statement to imply that defects in Corti's 

 organ are the only cause of a deficient musical faculty. In some 

 cases perhaps the cause may lie in the auditory centre, viz. the 

 part of the brain where the impulses of nerves, produced by the 

 stimuli of sound-waves, are transformed into the perceptions 

 which we call notes. Certain kinds of deficiency in the faculty 

 even suggest that the auditory organ and centre may be quite 

 normal, but that there is merely a less perfect and less complex 

 interconnection between this and the other brain-centres, so that 

 the mental perception of music is not possible although the 

 music itself is correctly heard. It is especially interesting to 

 compare such cases with the remarkable and extremely variable 

 phenomena witnessed in those who, from the lesion of a small 

 part of the brain, have lost, either wholly or in part, the 

 faculty of perceiving and producing music, such loss being 

 frequently associated with defects of speech. In addition to 



