The faculties of birds / [Anon].

  • James Rennie
Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The faculties of birds / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    78/392 page 56
    of nice diversity, the wonder would not have been great. But those who are without ear for music perceive as readily as others the faintest whisper ; they distinguish like them the faintest shades of difference in mere articulations of sound, which con¬ stitute the varieties of language, not the articulation only, but the differences also of the mere tones of affection or displeasure, grief or gaiety, which are so strikingly analogous to the varied expressions of musical feeling ; and their power of discrimination in every other case in which the judgment can be exercised is not less perfect. Nay, to increase still more the difficulty, they are often as sensible as others of the beauty of series of tones of a different kind; and some of our best poets and declaimers, who, of course, must have had a quick discernment of metrical rhythm, and of the melody of execution, have yet been incapable of distinguishing the musical relations of sounds, as reciprocally high or low, the melody that results from them in certain succession, and the harmony or the discord of their union. “ That it depends chiefly, or perhaps entirely, on the structure or state of the mere corporeal organ of hearing, which is of a kind, it must be remembered, peculiarly complicated, and therefore susceptible of great original diversity in the parts, and the relations of parts that form it, is very probable ; though the difference of the separate parts themselves, or of their relations to each other, may, to the mere eye, be so minute as never to be discovered by dissection, thus leaving to every future race of inquirers the same difficulty which has perplexed ourselves, and the same difficulty of overcoming it. “ In the sense of vision, we may remark, there is a species of defect very analogous to the want of musical ear ;—a defect which consists in the diffi¬ culty, or rather the incapacity, of distinguishing some
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