Footnotes 364 Index. 365 CURIOSITIES OF MUSIC. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION. Music has been broadly defined by Fetis as “the art of moving the feelings by combinations of sounds;” taken in this broad sense it may be considered as coeval with the human race. Vocal music, in a crude form, is as natural in man, to express feelings, as it is for a cat to purr or a lion to roar; as regards instrumental music, the primitive man might have found in every hollow tree a reverberating drum, and in every conchshell or horn of cattle, the natural beginnings of instrumental music; we shall find later that many nations ascribe the discovery of their music to the accidental appliance of some natural instrument; our surest guide in watching the rise of the art, should be the manner in which savage peoples, yet in a state of nature, produce music, and we shall find too, that even the lowest in the scale, even those beings who make the monkey tribe nearer and dearer to us, as possible relatives (the bushmen of Australia for example), have still a method of “moving the feelings by means of combinations of sounds.” It is therefore, really in barbarous nations, that we may, reasoning by analogy, find in what state music existed when our own ancestors were in a state of nature; but in order to give a more chronological character to our sketches we will begin with the _Music and Musical Mythology of the Ancients_. THE HINDOOS. With this people, and the Egyptians we find proofs of the existence of a musical system at a time which far antedates the earliest reliable Scriptural records. Among the Hindoos especially, as far back as history extends, music has been treated not only as a fine art, but philosophically and mathematically. According to the oldest Brahminical records, in their all-embracing “Temple of Science,” it belongs to the 2d chief division of Lesser Sciences, but its natural and philosophic elements, are, with a nice distinction, admitted into their holiest and oldest book, the _Veda_.[1] Of course it has a divine origin ascribed to it, in fact the entire realm of Indian music is one tale of Mythology.