APPENDIX. 129 
Music 1n Nature. — Contin. 
Any expression of doubt as to the existence of music in 
Nature was sure to be promptly met by our author. On 
one occasion he burst out, “That sort of talk should come 
only from the fellows that find their cuckoo music in the 
top of a Dutch clock. , The trombone blasts of the peacock 
are in melodic steps, the horse uses both the diatonic and 
the chromatic scale, and the ass jerks out his frightful 
salute in perfect octaves.’ All things have music in the 
rough, from the insect with a fiddle on its back? up to 
behemoth.” 
Carlyle says that the heart of Nature is music, and 
Niagara,3 Mammoth Cave,! the sonorous sands and musical 
stones seem to bear him out. Illustrations of music in 
Nature are to be found in a paper “On Melody in 
Speech”> by Dr. F. Weber (an English organist) : 
1 The vocal skill of the horse and of the ass are united, it seems, in a 
four-footed singer from afar. ‘“ An ape, one of the Gibbons, produces an 
exact octave of musical sounds, ascending and descending the scale by 
half-tones ; so that this monkey ‘alone of brute mammals may be said 
to sing.’ ” — Darwin. 
2 This expression suggested the design on the cover of the present 
volume. Reverse it, and we have a fair description of what old Father 
Kircher found on an antique gem and transferred to the title-page of 
the Musurgia. The old music-loving monk being the first, so far as we 
know, to write down the bird songs, it has seemed proper to link to him, 
by this pretty badge, the last lover of music and Nature to busy himself 
in the same delightful sort of reporting. The broken harp and the sing- 
ing insect may well be perpetuated as the emblem of the guild. 
8 Niagara. See Thayer, E. M.: Music of Niagara. (Scribner’s Mag, 
vol. xxi., 1880, pp. 583-586.) 
4 Mammoth Cave, Music in the, in Litt. Liv, Age, vol. Ixviii., 1861, 
. 289. 
5 Music in Speech, in Philos. Trans., vol. ii., p. 441. Same article in 
Litt. Liv. Age, vol. 1., 1856, p. 228. 
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