1879. ] Animal Music, its Nature and Origin. 211 
and third, which thus occur in every musical sound we hear, and 
which existed as physical peculiarities of vibrating bodies long 
before any living being came upon the earth, are also at the basis 
of human and, I hope to show, extra-human melody. It is a 
very suggestive coincidence, too thorough-going to have occurred 
by chance. The thought at once arises that the peculiar, com- 
pound, harmonic structure of musical sounds (more accurately, 
of the vibrations which produce them) has in some way impressed 
itself upon the auditory mechanism; so that melody, gradually 
growing under the guidance of the ear thus modified, has been 
moulded into a musical form similar to that possessed by the 
group of harmonically-related tones which we have seen to com- 
pose the sounds indicated. 
This seems very probable. For since each terminal nerve of 
the thousands in the cochlea responds to a given simple tone, the 
group of such tones forming a musical sound wilt excite a cor- 
responding group of nerves, which will of course be related 
amongst themselves as are the exciting tones amongst them- 
selves; that is, they will be serially octaves, fifths, fourths and 
thirds apart. Every nerve will, therefore, have always been 
stimulated in company with certain others, at harmonic intervals 
from it; and it is inevitable that the incessant and long continued 
repetition of this codperate activity should have resulted in some 
anatomical or functional bond; a pathway, as it were, leading 
from each member of the group to every other. Zhe progress of 
any melody will be easiest along this harmonic pathway, worn by 
the physical structure of sound. 
For this reason it seems to me, “ musical tones in a certain 
order give man and other animals pleasure.”! Take the case of 
some primitive bird of the type from which the various Insessores 
have diverged (singing birds belong chiefly to this Order). For 
innumerable years the harmonic structure of sound vibrations 
had been impressing itself upon the auditory mechanism of his 
‘ancestors, segregating the terminal nerves, or whatever the audi- 
tory units might be, into groups, and habituating the members of 
each group to concerted activity. He, in turn inheriting that 
1 The word pleasure has been a stumbling block. Were the concretes of which it 
is the abstract always expressed, thus—“ I feel an easy performance of some func- — 
tion; or a general nervous stimulation and exaltation; or an impulse to continue 
this sensation or action ”—were this done, many seeming difficulties of physio-psy- 
chology would vanish. ae 
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