133 



reason but also of the ear, as bing of aid to one ano- 

 ther ; and inconsequence of thi- laid down a sure me. 

 thod for finding, out the proportions of sounds. Had 

 the ancients done no more with respect to music, than, 

 made the discoveries already taken notice of, that 

 science must be infinitely more indebted to thm,than it 

 possiblycould be to those who succeeded them, for what 

 additions they have afterwards made. The ancrents 

 have the whole merit of having laid down the first 

 exact principles of music; and the writings of the 

 Pythagoreans, of Anstoxenes, Euclid, Aristides, Ni- 

 comachus, Plutarch, and many others, even such of 

 them as still remain, contain in them every theory of 

 music yet known. They knew, as well as we, the 

 art of noting their tunes, which among them was cal- 

 led the parasemantic, or semeiotic, performed by 

 means of entire letters either contracted or reversed,, 

 placed upon a line parallel to the words., and serving 

 for the direction, the one of the voice, the other of 

 the instrument ; and the scale itself, of which Guy 

 Aretin is the supposed inventor, is no other than the 

 ancient one of the Greeks a little enlarged, and what 

 Guy may have taken from a Greek manuscript,' written 

 above eight hundred years ago, which Kircher says 

 he saw at Messina, in the library of the Jesuits, where- 

 in he found the hymns noted, just as in the manner of 

 Aretin. 



18. As to the effects, which music produced, and 

 the manner of performing it, so far were the ancients 

 from falling short of the moderns in these respects, 

 that .as to the former, after reducing the accounts we 

 have of it to the most rigid conformity to truth, they 

 still appear therein to have gone far beyond us : and 

 as the latter, though it be alleged, that their instru- 

 ments were not so complete as ours, and that they 

 knew not, nor put in practice those divisions in har- 

 mony, which enter into our concerts ; yet this seems 

 to be a groundless objection. The lyre, for instance, 

 was certainly a very harmonious instrument, and iu 



