WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 5TH, 1890. 
MR. H. DAVEY, Junior, 
ON 
THE EVOLUTION OF MUSIC. 
Developed Music may be roughly grouped into three divi- 
sions: Pure Vocal Music, Accompanied Vocal Music, and Pure 
Instrumental Music. The first to develop, pure vocal music, 
lasted down to the year 1600, when it was displaced by the other 
two. Accompanied vocal music reached its climax between the 
years 1725 and 1750; pure instrumental music not until the present 
century. As no satisfactory definition of music had ever been 
given, he offered, as the best he could invent, “ Music is the 
judicious use of the phenomena of sound,” and he undertook to 
prove that its evolution had consisted in the transformation of the 
homogeneous into the heterogeneous, that it had undergone the 
differentiations, integrations, and (in the first great division of the 
Art) even the equilibration, which, according to Herbert Spencer, are 
the successive stages of evolution. It is known (he proceeded) 
that sound is produced by vibrations, conveyed by the air to the 
drum of the ear, and thence to the brain. At about 30 vibrations 
a second, sound becomes audible ; this is about the rate of vibra- 
tion of the longest string of a pianoforte ; the shortest string of a 
pianoforte vibrates as many as 4,000 times a second. Notes may 
be heard beyond these limits, but they are not very clear, Herbert 
Spencer, in a well-known essay, and Tylor, in his Anthropology, 
both derive music from emotionalised language, This is question- 
able. At any rate, the most rudimentary forms of music now 
known seem a direct imitation of the song of birds. It is 
practically certain that the advancement of musical skill must 
have affected the hearing apparatus. In the labyrinth of the ear 
Corti discovered that there are some 3,000 fibres, and without 
doubt these are imperfect in some ears, and sharply defined and 
separated in others. The power of recognising a tune is the 
lowest form of the sense of tone ; and this power is posssessed by 
some of the lower animals, as by horses and birds, but seems very 
deficient in some of the human race. Something too much has 
been talked of the heredity of the musical talent, even by Spencer 
in the Principles of Biology, for there have been cases where a 
musician of the very highest gifts suddenly appeared in a quite 
unmusical family, but no doubt the rule holds good in general. 
