MUSIC AND SCIENCE. 
179 
in this spirit ; but in one university the professor of music is 
reported to have resented any scientific study of music as a 
profanation ; and in another, the chair was endowed that its 
occupant might compose, not teach. 
Having in such a journey with a superhuman visitor 
quickly collected a variety of facts about music, a few ot 
which have just been recited, the scientific man may attempt 
to arrange and classify them, to analyze and resynthesize 
them, if he thinks it worth while; but before there was any 
modern science, this attempt was begun ; the search for the 
basis of music antedates the search for the North Pole, the 
Holy Grail, the Philosopher’s Stone. It will be enough for 
this evening if we consider some methods and results of in- 
vestigation on the formation of scales. 
For clearness, first recall our own piano-scale ; it is intended 
to give twelve exactly-equal chromatic steps to the Octave; 
but the succession of the white keys is more often thought of, 
and this is nearly a diatonic succession, of seven unequal 
steps. This scale has to serve for harmony and for accom- 
panied melody, and generally other instruments and the 
trained voice correspond to it. But it is sometimes deviated 
from intentionally; a solo violinist will sometimes make his 
Fourths and Sevenths sharper than the piano, according to 
his feeling in the particular piece he is playing ; the violinist 
or singer will slide from one note to another ; and the notes of 
a good string or trombone quartette do not quite belong to the 
piano-scale. 
In contrast to this, note the Siamese scale, which has, accord- 
ing to their theorists, seven equal steps to the Octave; con- 
firmation comes in two ways; first, by examining the pitch 
of instruments tuned by native musicians, and second by 
submitting to their judgment instruments tuned more pre- 
cisely than they can do it. In China the old theory calls for 
a scale made by ascending Fifths, all the notes being reduced 
within one Octave: thus C, G, D, A, E; the next term in the 
series. B, is so close to C that unless the tuning were good the 
two notes might be so nearly the same as to be practically 
