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