vni THE HUMAN RACES 349 



sensibility to pain. On the whole he found no essential difference 

 between Todas and English, with the exception that colour- 

 blindness is much commoner amongst Todas and they are far less 

 sensitive to pain. 



Eanke, who made accurate tests of the sharpness of sight of 

 South American Indians, found their sight to be no better than 

 that of Europeans. 



Pechuel-Loesche (1907), who tested the sight, smell, hearing, 

 taste, and sensitiveness to pain of the Africans on the Loango 

 coast, came to the same conclusions as Rivers, finding no great 

 difference except in sensitiveness to pain, which appears to be 

 duller in these races than in civilised nations. 



Rivers rightly observes with regard to this point that the 

 comparison usually made between the sensitiveness to pain of 

 the lower races and that of civilised nations is not absolutely 

 reliable, since in the latter case the individuals tested lead a 

 life too dissimilar to that of the former; we ought rather to 

 compare data obtained by examining our peasants, whose life 

 in many respects resembles that of these lower races. 



That the sense of hearing possesses the same fundamental 

 properties in all human races seems to me to be proved by 

 Baglioni's examination (made in 1910) of various musical instru- 

 ments, some belonging to different African tribes and others to 

 natives of Oceania and America. He tested the musical pitch 

 of the sounds produced by these instruments, more especially 

 by African instruments of percussion (marimbas and sansis) and 

 wind instruments (Pan's pipes) and the musical intervals between 

 the single notes, and found that some of them had an almost 

 perfect classic, diatonic scale the scale, that is to say, on which 

 the music of all civilised races is based and that in all of them 

 intermediate degrees could be produced leading more or less 

 directly to the fuU realisation of the musical scale, based on the 

 principle of harmonically consonant intervals (octave, fifth, major, 

 and minor third). Hence the diatonic scale cannot be regarded 

 either as the fruit of our artistic culture or as resulting from the 

 special exigencies of certain musical instruments, as is held by 

 Wallaschek. It is rather the natural and direct result of the 

 demands made from within, otherwise of the psycho-physical 

 properties with which the sense of hearing of the whole human 

 race is endowed. This does not, however, prevent the music of 

 certain races possessing special characteristics, due to preference 

 for certain musical intervals. We know, for example, that Greek 

 music reached an advanced stage of development in the melodic 

 mode, in which, as well as our diatonic and chromatic scales, an 

 enharmonic scale was used, having intervals smaller than a 

 semitone and quite, unknown in modern music (Gervaert). 

 Stumpf (1901) proved that the Siamese make use of a special 



