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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVIII. No. 971 



istic of the childhood of the race in which 

 everything outside of man is interpreted 

 as essentially manlike in essence, life more 

 or less manlike being assumed to be every- 

 where — in sea and sky and air and earth — 

 acting in manlike ways and thinking man- 

 like thoughts. This interpretation, the 

 basis of much of our most imaginative 

 speech and poetry, is still fascinating and 

 full of interest. 



"We need not here raise the world-old 

 questions of realism versus idealism in 

 philosophy. In the childhood of the race, 

 as in the childhood of every one of us to- 

 day, the visible universe was intensely per- 

 sonal, palpitating with a life closely similar 

 to our own and only gradually separated 

 from it by the slow teachings of experience. 

 For precisely as the child of to-day gazes 

 upon kitten, doll or dog and interprets 

 these as charged with a life and character 

 similar to his own, so in the childhood of 

 the race mankind saw in the wind-swept 

 tree, generally at rest but sometimes 

 swayed as by an unseen hand, a living 

 agency to whose touch the awakened tree 

 responds as if from sleeping or dreaming, 

 now by deep sighs or soft murmurs, now 

 by groaning or roaring. And when Lowell 

 in his "Under the Willows" exclaims, 

 "My ELmwood chimneys seem crooning to 

 me," he is simply making modem poetical 

 use of a fireside music which by his remote 

 ancestors would have been interpreted as 

 spirit voices. 



It was doubtless one of the greatest 

 forward steps ever made in the emancipa- 

 tion of the human intellect when Pytha- 

 goras of Samos before the Golden Age of 

 Greece detected a constant and impersonal 

 relation between the length of a vibrating 

 string and the sound which accompanied 

 it. This discovery of the monochord still 

 stands as the very foundation of acoustics 

 in spite of the fact that it was immediately 



misinterpreted by Pjrthagoras and his fol- 

 lowers as signifying a universal relation 

 between sound and music and number, and 

 a universal existence of undetected har- 

 mony in seemingly silent bodies, an inter- 

 pretation which lingers even yet in the 

 phrase "the music of the spheres," and 

 has furnished us with many beautiful lines 

 of poetry, such as those of Shakespeare 

 and Milton, and the following much later, 

 from Pope's "Essay on Man": 



If Nature thundered in his opening ears 

 And stunned him with the music of the spheres, 

 How would he wish that heaven had left him still 

 The whispering zephyr and the purling rill. 



Longfellow only yesterday referred to 

 The Samian's great .3ilolian lyre 

 Eising through all its seven-fold bars 

 From earth unto the fixed stars 

 And through the dewy atmosphere 

 Not only could I see but hear 

 Its wondrous and harmonious strings 

 In sweet vibration sphere by sphere. 



■ — "The Occultation of Orion." 

 And 



even in recent times no meaner a philosopher 

 than Karl Ernst von Baer has asked if there is 

 not "perhaps a murmur in universal space, a har- 

 mony of the spheres, audible to quite other ears 

 than ours." (Gomperz.) 



Yet Pythagoras lived not long before the 

 golden age of Greece and we do not find 

 even among the Greek nature philosophers 

 many less mystical interpretations. 



Students of the history of mathematics 

 refer to three famous mathematical prob- 

 lems of antiquity as "the three classical 

 problems," so called because no satisfac- 

 tory solution of them could be found; but 

 external nature and inductive science had 

 also their "classical" problems, such as 

 the meaning of day and night, the periodic 

 coming and going of the seasons, the 

 rhythmic phases of the moon, the annual 

 rise of the Nile, the winds, the pulsating 

 tides, all sorts of sounds and music, the 

 origin of man and of the lower animals 



