468 DARWINISM 



of social life, their appreciation of music appears to rise in 

 proportion; and we find among them rude stringed instruments 

 and whistles, till, in Java, we have regular bands of skilled 

 performers probably the successors of Hindoo musicians of 

 the age before the Mahometan conquest. The Egyptians are 

 believed to have been the earliest musicians, and from them 

 the Jews and the Greeks, no doubt, derived their knowledge 

 of the art ; but it seems to be admitted that neither the latter 

 nor the Romans knew anything of harmony or of the essential 

 features of modern music. 1 Till the fifteenth century little 

 progress appears to have been made in the science or the 

 practice of music ; but since that era it has advanced with 

 marvellous rapidity, its progress being curiously parallel with 

 that of mathematics, inasmuch as great musical geniuses 

 appeared suddenly among different nations, equal in their 

 possession of this special faculty to any that have since 

 arisen. 



As with the mathematical, so with the musical faculty, 

 it is impossible to trace any connection between its possession 

 and survival in the struggle for existence. It seems to have 

 arisen as a result of social and intellectual advancement, not 

 as a cause ; and there is some evidence that it is latent in the 

 lower races, since under European training native military 

 bands have been formed in many parts of the world, which 

 have been able to perform creditably the best modern music. 



The artistic faculty has run a somewhat different course, 

 though analogous to that of the faculties already discussed. 

 Most savages exhibit some rudiments of it, either in drawing 

 or carving human or animal figures ; but, almost without 

 exception, these figures are rude and such as would be 

 executed by the ordinary inartistic child. In fact, modern 

 savages are, in this respect hardly equal to those prehistoric 

 men who represented the mammoth and the reindeer on pieces 

 of horn or bone. With any advance in the arts of social life, 

 we have a corresponding advance in artistic skill and taste, 

 rising very high in the art of Japan and India, but culminating 

 in the marvellous sculpture of the best period of Grecian 

 history. In the Middle Ages art was chiefly manifested in 

 1 See "History of Music," in Eng. Cyc, Science and Arts Division. 



