Oct. 5,1876] 



NATURE 



503 



with the other fine arts, and to a sketch of its history, 

 which is less satisfactory than other portions of the 

 work. The following account of Hebrew music is quaint 

 in the extreme : — " David and Solomon were very musical. 

 They composed psalms full of inspiration, and evidently 

 intended to be sung. To the latter is due the magni- 

 ficent organisation of the singing in the Temple at 

 Jerusalem. He founded a school for singers, and a 

 considerable band, which at last reached the number of 

 4,000 trumpeters." The " Lyre of Orpheus," and the 

 ratios derived from its traditional four strings, are far 

 more fully explained. The Ambrosian and Gregorian 

 scales follow, as well as the first attempts at polyphonic 

 music in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Guy d'Arezzo 

 is still credited with the invention of modern notation, 

 though he really only used " neumas " and two clef lines, 

 or staves, one yellow and one red. Luther, who doubtless 

 was a musician, is accepted as the reformer of music as 

 well as of the church. The modern and Pythagorean 

 scales are numerically compared, and then transposition 

 and modulation lead to a description of temperament. 

 " The temperate scale," as it is here termed, " starts with 

 the principle of making no distinction between the major 

 and minor tone, of confounding the major semitone with 

 the minor, and of considering the sharp of a note as equal 

 to the flat of the succeeding note ; so that all the notes 

 of an octave are reduced to twelve only, which are con- 

 sidered equidistant from each other." 



The difficulties in the way of true intonation, especially 

 in the case of keyed instruments, are fairly stated, and 

 the writer concludes with a remark in which we cordially 

 sympathise : — " It does not, therefore, appear impossible, 

 or even really difficult, for the full orchestra and chorus to 

 perform a piece of music in the exact scale." 



The subject of the eighth chapter is quality or " Timbre," 

 in which Helmholtz's views are expounded and illustrated 

 by good diagrams of optical and graphical methods, and 

 of Koenig's ingenious apparatus. The last section draws 

 distinctions between music as a science and as an art, 

 and between Italian and German music ; giving a re- 

 markably fair estimate of Rossini's position as a melodist, 

 rather than as a scientific musician, and on the other hand 

 a deserved tribute of praise to the lofty character and 

 deep dramatic feeling which, "notwithstanding some too 

 realistic exaggerations, and some trivialities," mark the 

 compositions of Richard Wagner. 



On the whole, this volume is easily and clearly 

 written, although, as already noted, it is rather sketchy 

 and hurried in the historical part. There are other minor 

 typographical, or probably translator's, oversights, such as 

 Terpandro for Terpander, Cornue for Cornu, Orlando 

 Tasso for Orlando Lasso, and harmonicon for harmonium. 

 But it affords a readable rhume of a subject which is daily 

 rising in scientific, as well as in purely artistic interest. 



W. H. SlONE 



TWO BOOKS ON LANGUAGE 

 The Existence of Mixed Languages. By J. C. Clough. 



(London : Longmans, Green, and Co., 1870.) 

 Oil the Comparative Method of Learning Forei^^n Lan- 

 guages. By L. J. V. Gerard. (Leicester : 1876.) 

 THE existence of mixed languages is one of the vexed 

 questions of Comparative Philology. By a mixed 

 language is meant a language in which the grammars of 



two or more different languages have been fused together^ 

 not one in which the vocabulary is of a heterogeneous 

 character. Mixed languages in the latter sense are, of 

 course, plentiful enough ; in fact there are languages like 

 the Basque or the Telugu, in which the proportion of 

 borrowed words is larger than that of native words. 

 But though words may be borrowed, it is a grave question 

 whether the expression of grammatical relations can be, 

 and modern philology has been inclined to deny the 

 possibility of such an occurrence. The grammar of one 

 speech may be influenced by that of another, existing 

 machinery being adapted to express grammatical concep- 

 tions introduced from abroad, or foreign modes of form- 

 ing the sentence being imitated, and the idioms of one 

 language may even be adopted by another, but anything 

 beyond this is extremely unlikely. It is in grammar 

 and structure that languages differ from one another ; the 

 expression of the relations of grammar embodies the mode 

 in which a particular community thinks, and a change in 

 their expression is equivalent to a change in the mode of 

 thinking. And this mode of thinking is the result of a 

 long succession of past experiences and stereotyped 

 habits of thought. 



Mr. Clough boldly challenges the orthodox view of the 

 impossibility of mixed languages. He endeavours to 

 support his heresy by an appeal to contrary instances' 

 Thus he points to jargons like the Chinook, or Pigeon- 

 English, to languages like Maltese or Hindustani, which 

 have grown out of jargons, and finally to independent 

 forms of speech like Turkish or Persian, in which he 

 believes he finds examples of mixed languages. But he 

 does not always distinguish between mixture in the 

 grammar and in the vocabulary, or between the borrow- 

 ing of idioms and of grammatical conceptions. Hence 

 a large part of his book, that which deals with languages 

 like the Keltic, the Romanic, and the Teutonic, is quite 

 beside the point. On the other hand, he has omitted to 

 notice some very important cases of an apparently 

 mixed grammar, such as the Pahlavi of ancient Persia, 

 the Assamese and kindred dialects of Northern India, 

 and the Sub-Semitic languages of Africa. A full dis- 

 cussion of the phenomena presented by these might lead 

 to a modification of the orthodox doctrine, at all events 

 so far as the flexion of the noun is concerned. As 

 it is, Mr. Clough has brought forward a good deal of 

 pertinent matter, though a larger amount of what has 

 nothing to do with the question in dispute. The whole 

 of the second part of his book, for example, which 

 relates to English, might easily have been spared. The 

 book, however, is full of information, and the facts col- 

 lected are usually accurate. 



M. Gerard has reprinted a lecture deUvered by him at 

 the Leicester Museum, on the scientific, and therefore the 

 natural, way of learning foreign languages. The lecture 

 is an excellent one, at once original, clear, and practical. 

 M. Gerard is no friend to existing systems of teaching 

 French and German, and he is undoubtedly right in his 

 belief that their failure is due to a neglect of the way in 

 which children learn their own or a foreign tongue. In- 

 stead of beginning by studying the rules of grammar and 

 loading the memory with lists of isolated words, the child 

 speaks in sentences, and only gradually learns to distin- 

 guish the several words of a sentence and the parts of 



