What can be more strange than that the rubbing of a little hair and cat-gut together, should make such a mighty Alteration in a Man that sits at a distance? JEREMY COLLIER, _Essay on Music_: 1698. "Music the fiercest grief can charm." POPE, _St. Cecilia's Day_, I, 118. From time immemorial the influence of musical sounds has been recognized as a valuable agent in the treatment of nervous affections, and for the relief of various mental conditions. According to one theory, the healing quality of a musical tone is due to its regular periodic vibrations. It acts by substituting its own state of harmony for a condition of mental or physical discord. Noise, being inharmonious, has no curative power. Music may be termed the health and noise the disease of sound.[173:1] "The man that hath no music in himself," says Shakespeare ("The Merchant of Venice," Act v, Scene 1), "nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted. . . ." The ancient Egyptians were not ignorant of musico-therapy. They called music physic for the soul, and had faith in its specific remedial virtues. Music was an accompaniment of their banquets, and in the time of the fourth and fifth dynasties consisted usually of the harmony of three instruments, the harp, flute, and pipe.[173:2] The Persians are said to have cured divers ailments by the sound of the lute. They believed that the soul was purified by music and prepared thereby for converse with the spirits of light around the throne of Ormuzd, the principle of truth and goodness. And the most eminent Grecian philosophers attributed to music important medicinal properties for both body and mind. John Harrington Edwards, in his volume, "God and Music,"[174:1] remarks that the people of antiquity had much greater faith than the moderns in the efficacy of music as a curative agent in disease of every kind; while the scientific mind of to-day demands a degree of evidence which history cannot furnish, for asserted cures by this means in early times. Impressed with the sublime nature of music, the ancients ascribed to it a divine origin. According to one tradition, its discovery was due to the sound produced by the wind whistling among the reeds, which grew on the borders of the Nile.