In his address delivered at the public meeting of the Royal Bavarian Academy of Sciences at Munich, in March, 1889, the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Ohm, Eugene Lommel, in discussing the scientific work of Ohm, said: "Inasmuch as his law in acoustics furnished the clearest insight into the hitherto incomprehensible nature of musical tones, it dominates the acoustics of to-day no less completely than Ohm's law of the electric current dominates the science of electricity."[24] This law concerns the resolution of tones into their constituents. The ideas laid down by Ohm were almost absolutely novel. They were so new that none of the workers in acoustics could think that Ohm had made a great discovery. His law states that the human ear perceives only pendulum-like vibration as a simple tone. Every other periodic motion it resolves into a collection of pendulum-like vibrations, which it then hears in the sound as a series of single tones, fundamentals and overtones. Ohm arrived at this law from mathematical considerations, making use of Fourier's series; for its experimental verification he was compelled to use the well-cultivated ear of a friend, inasmuch as he was himself, as we have said, quite devoid of musical appreciation. Ohm's results were too distant from the accustomed ideas of investigators of sound at that time to be accepted by them. Seebeck, who was one of the most prominent scientists of the time in acoustics, did not hesitate to criticise severely, just as Pohl had made little of Ohm's law of the electric current. While, however, foreigners were to teach German scientists the value of the advance that their great colleague in electricity had made, the privilege of pointing out the significance of his work in sound was to be a compatriot's good fortune. It was nearly a score of years, however, before this vindication was to take place. Then Helmholtz, a decade after Ohm's death, furnished the experimental means which enabled even the unskilled ear to resolve a sound into its simple partial tones, and revolutionized the theory of music by his classic work, "The Science of the Perception of Sound," which is based entirely on Ohm's law of acoustics.