340 



NA TURE 



[February 8, 1894 



student should commit to memory is separately printed, 

 and precedes the first chapter. Beginners will find it 

 better on their first reading to omit the articles specially^ 

 marked for this end, and also to make selections from 

 the examples. It would be hard to find a better intro- 

 duction to plane trigonometry book. 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 



The Editor does not hold himself responsible for opinions ex- 

 pressed by his correspondents. Neither can he undertake 

 to return, or to correspond with the writers of, rejected 

 manuscripts intended for this or any other part (j/Nature, 

 No notice is taken of anonymous communications.'] 



Music, Rhythm, and Muscle. 



In your issue of January i8, you refer (on p. 271) to an 

 article by Dr. Wilks in the Medical Magazine (which I have 

 not seen), in which the learned author points out that music is 

 not to be regarded in its origin as a purely spiritual faculty, but 

 that it admits of a physiological explanation. This dis- 

 cussion is in itself a most interesting one. Dr. Wallace, in his 

 well-known discussion of the relations of music to the other 

 faculties of man, has raised this very question, or one closely 

 allied to it. Wallaschek, as quoted by Dr. Wilks and your- 

 self, asserts that "rhythm, or keeping time, lies at the very 

 foundation of the musical sense." Rhythm again, he says, 

 "can be referred to muscular contraction and relaxation,'" the 

 "muscular sense being the measure of time," so that the mus- 

 cular sense is intimately bound up with the idea of music. 

 " Not in the different passions of the mind, but in muscular 

 action, therefore, music appears to have had its origin." 



My purpose in addressing you is to point out that these 

 opinions receive a remarkable and very beautiful illustration in 

 the history of Greek dance and rhythm, so far as these are 

 known to us. We know but little of Greek music in the 

 stricter sense of this word, and this perhaps for the very reason 

 that music was not then separated from choral intonation and 

 movement. The strophe and antistrophe of the Greek chorus, 

 which terms we usually apply to the musical phrases sung during 

 a movement, are primarily, of course, not these strains but the 

 evolutions themselves, the dancing towards the one side of the 

 orchestra or the other. No w we do know from the metrical analysis 

 of Greek dramas and odes what these rhythms were, and we can 

 thus probably infer the character of the music proper. By the 

 study of Greek rhythms we shall thus find a method of tracing the 

 genesis of music in its most elaborate modern forms from dancing 

 and footing it in any kind of measure. Dr. Wilks well points 

 out that muscular movement is essentially rhythmical : we may 

 go farther and say that all movement, even the rush of falling 

 water, is rhythmical. 



The monotony of the recurrence of identical periods or colons 

 would soon be felt, and we find accordingly that efforts are 

 made by all early people to vary the measures. The use of 

 two and four simple feet would soon pall, and was accordingly 

 broken up in the Greek drama by threefold and more complex 

 metres, as, for instance, by Pindar in his Epinikian odes. This 

 " threefold form," says a recent writer, finds an almost exact 

 counterpart in most of the figures of Bach's " Wohltemperirtes 

 Klavier," and the " modern sonata has the same form on a very 

 extended scale," the first part and its repetition corresponding 

 with the strophe and antistrophe of the Greeks, and the second 

 part with the epode. These curious parallels and essential 

 similarities may be traced much farther and into elaborate de- 

 tail, as is shown in part by the writer I have quoted, Mr. Abdy 

 Williams, in the Classical Revieiu for 1893 (p. 295). Mr. 

 Williams's article, which well deserves a careful reading, is 

 based upon the important discovery of a treatise on rhythm 

 by Aristoxenus of Tarentum. Aristoxenus was a favourite 

 pupil of Aristotle, and flourished about 300 is.C. ; he wrote also 

 a treatise on harmony, which less concerns us here, and he was 

 "not only a musician, but a man of the widest culture and 

 knowledge." Soon after the time of Aristoxenus the depend- 

 ence of music on metre, which in its turn is a notation of choral 

 movement andbut a regulation of the rhythms of various muscular 

 moveoaent— ihe dependence, I say, of music on metre gave way 

 to the ascendancy of accent. Accent, and not quantity began to 



NO. 1267, VOL. 49] 



form the basis of the rhythm. Strict measure thus became less 

 obviously the basis of music and poetical rhythm ; but, says 

 Mr. Williams, "upon the ruins of the ancient measured music 

 arose a new and magnificent art, now known as ' Plain Song' 

 or ' Gregorian Music,' the rhythmical construction of which is 

 based on the natural laws of phrasing. " (Compare strophe and 

 antistrophe.) 



With the disuse of plain song arose again the old metrical 

 rhythms, but now so dissociated from choral evolutions that we 

 have forgotten their muscular origin. The early modern com- 

 posers recovered the elaborate rhythms once founded on choric 

 phrases, but under the name of "form," and "by following 

 the instincts of their genius, unconsciously brought about a 

 renaissance of the natural rhythms and musical forms known to 

 the ancient Greeks, developing them by the aid of modern re- 

 sources, while adhering to certain definite principles which on 

 examination are found to agree with those enunciated 2000 

 years ago by Aristoxenus of Tarentum." These, I need not 

 repeat, were almost directly based not upon rhetorical, but upon 

 muscular rhythms. The simpler and ruder the musical sense, the 

 more brief and simply bipartite, or two-legged, must be the recur- 

 rent rhythms, as the popular tunes of our street organs and 

 music halls tell us daily ; the more relieved and elaborated 

 rhythms of Bach and Beethoven need a more sustained atten- 

 tion and a more cultivated apprehension, while the rhythms of 

 Wagner are so postponed in their resolutions, and so broken in 

 their variety, that perhaps few even of good musicians can follow 

 them with any consciousness of muscular measure, or even of 

 "form." Therefore we call them " highly spiritualised," and 

 forget whence they are originally derived. 



Cambridge, January 28. T. Clifford Allbutt. 



P.S. — Since writing this letter, Prof. Roy has drawn my 

 attention to the stateoient that if a pencil be taken in the right 

 hand, a sheet of paper placed below if, and the hand thrown into 

 a rapid automatic dotting action, as the paper is drawn forward 

 the resulting row of dots will be found to be a uniform number 

 per second — five or seven, I forget which — and thus for all 

 persons alike there is the basis of rhythm. 



The Cloudy Condensation of Steam. 



The publication in your pages ^ of Mr. Shelford Bidwell's 

 lecture on " The Cloudy Condensation of Steam," at the Royal 

 Institution in May last, calls for a few remarks from me. As the 

 points I have to refer to are principally personal, I shall be as 

 brief as possible. 



In discussing the effects of electrification on the condensation 

 of a steam jet, Mr. Bidwell, after pointing out that though it 

 has been shown that small particles of matter are thrown off by 

 the electrical discharge, says that — "Yet it is remarkable that 

 Mr. Aitken . . . gives no countenance to the nucleus theory." 

 He then informs his hearers that he imagines I have abandoned 

 my conclusions regarding the action of dust. It is very difficult 

 to understand Mr. Bidwell's objection to me not countenancing 

 the nucleus theory to explain the phenomena, as in the very 

 next paragraph he shows I was correct in not ascribing the 

 change in the jet when under electrification to dust particles, 

 and gives an experiment to prove it. His experiment is dif- 

 ferent from the one on which I founded my conclusion. In 

 some experiments made when working at this subject there did 

 not seem to be a possibility of the dust produced by the elec- 

 trical discharge getting to the jet. Take, for example, the fol- 

 lowing experiment : — The steam jet was allowed to issue from 

 the side of a polished metal ball of about 3 cm. diameter. 

 This arrangement was adopted to prevent any discharge of 

 electricity from the nozzle. At one side of the jet was placed 

 an electrified body at a distance of about 10 cm.; and at about 

 the same distance on the other side of the jet was placed a 

 flame. As no air passed either from the flame or from the elec- 

 trified body to the jet, it seemed impossible the effect could be 

 due either to particles of metal from the conductor or to par- 

 ticles of dust from the flame. The conclusion, therefore, was 

 that the effect on the jet could be produced by electricity 

 without the aid of dust. It, however, seems highly probable 

 that the dust produced by the discharge of electricity may have 

 some effect in such experiments as those described by Prof. 

 Barus, in which the air from the terminals from which the dis- 

 charge is taking place is carried to the jet. Prof. J. J. Thomson 



1 Nature, Decemler 20, 1S93, 



