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WEAD. 
in securing a more uniform tone-quality and in providing 
for more rapid playing; when a clarinet player must control 
19 or more holes with only 10 fingers, he has need of all the 
assistance the skilled mechanician can give him. The student 
is struck with the fact that the practical instrument-makers 
seem to have made little use of the solid knowledge of the 
physicist, while some of the attempts to apply scientific prin- 
ciples have been musical or commercial failures; it seems to 
be thought that the popular books tell all that is known of 
the laws of vibrating bodies, whereas the statements in them 
are only first approximations. But the physicist must admire 
the marvelous skill of some makers and voicers of instru- 
ments and wish his apparatus were as reliable as the expert’s 
ear in judging of quality of tone. The newest large instru- 
ment is the choracelo, exhibited last spring at Symphony 
Hall in Boston, a piano having both hammers and electrical 
devices for sustaining the tones and giving much change in 
quality. 
If our visitant should inquire whether music has any 
moral qualities or effects (entirely independent of words) 
w T ho could answnr him confidently? The Greeks thought it 
had ; the Chinese have insisted for many centuries that it has; 
of writers in English but one man is recalled, who seemed 
sure, — the Irish classical scholar, Mahaffy; he held that a 
passage of music may be as immoral as a picture or a passage 
in a book. (The influence of songs in school and home and 
church, and of music in medical treatment are different ques- 
tions.) 
And lastly, before the visitor leaves, let him tell how he 
finds music is regarded in the higher institutions of learning. 
In German universities only a few" years ago its teachers were 
listed with those of fencing, dancing, and gymnastics. But 
now in several universities in Germany, England, and 
America there is a professor of music; how far the subject is 
taught (or can profitably be taught), not servilelv or merelv 
as a career, but as a branch of a liberal education, and with 
sympathetic insight into the musical activities of far-away 
peoples, it is not easy to learn ; some men seem to be teaching 
