MUSIC AND MEDICINE.

Vibration the Source and Sole Condition of All Life-Health a Synonym for Harmonious Vibration-Disease Is Vibratory Discord.

BY SAMUEL S. WALLIAN, A.M., M.D.

LIFE originates in vibration and consists of an incessant repetition of vibrations.

Health is a sequence of persistent vibrations in harmonious series.

Disease is vibratory discord.

posing the external world produces impressions which we perceive through the medium of responsive vibrations within us, and we classify these impressions according to kind, and ascribe them to the special senses. The assemblage of nerves, muscles, arteries, respiratory mechanism—all the organs whose functions and exercise constitute living-are but unconscious vibrations, the immediate source of which we trace to trophic centers, the solar plexus, or involuntary cerebration; but of whose ultimate source we can but vaguely conjecture. In response to our interrogation the metaphy

This condenses a volume of physiology, philosophy and physic into four sentences. First, molecular, then bioplasmic, and finally organic or structural vibrations.

This is the modus and inception of evolution. It is the only satisfactory solution of the law of natural selection, the origin of species and the variation of individuals.

An individual is a nucleus representing the sequence of a series of constant vibrations concentrated.

Richet maintains that the external world, with all its diversified activities and organic exponents, is but the sum of blending and contrasting vibrations.

If molecular vibration could be stilled but for an instant the law of cohesion would be annulled, all semblance of organized structure would vanish; all life, both animal and vegetable, would become extinct, nature herself would be abolished and chaos would resume her ancient sway.

We live because every molecule of matter composing our bodies maintains a tireless though unapparent transition; creative energy illustrating the only possible example of perpetual motion.

When any organized structure or individual embodiment of motion encounters a force that interrupts its normal rhythm and rate of vibration the result is called disease. If the interruption is complete and continuous the shock is called death.

The vibration of particles of matter com

theologian evades the question by substituting a name without solving the mystery.

We may content ourselves with the plausible assumption that soul by common consent represents the sentient somethingessence, origin, force-that stands behind matter and imparts to it its identity, its perceptivity and self-consciousness. Το this principle the physical body bears the same relation as do the strings, reeds and pipes to the music evolved from the organ and the orchestra. When the spirit, or to use a term for the moment quite in literary vogue-the subliminal self-departs, the organ and the organism are both dumb. This is the law of life, the law of growth and the law of death; death being neither more nor less than a change of form.

A million molecules of matter, however ethereal and imponderable, bombard the sentient centers, and the responsive consciousness takes up the rhythmic coincidence and shapes the teeming forms we call thoughts. Thus, fancy is as much an entity as any problem in Euclid. Science has not yet invented instruments of sufficient delicacy and accuracy to weigh and measure these "airy nothings"; but they have both motion and volition, since they can be projected with greater velocity and farther into space than the more material things with which we hold daily intercourse.

Every soul is a vibratory storm center hurling its concepts upon surrounding objects, the response elicited indicating our

estimate of the natural objects constituting our environment, of our neighbor, friend, husband, wife, child or lover.

Vibrations are thus the only source of impressions, whether physical, mental or psychic. When vibrations are pitched within a certain range of frequency we recognize them as sounds. Measured by the average perceptivity it has been found that an organ pipe thirty-two feet long emits the slowest vibrations, and therefore the lowest note that can be detected by the average human ear. The upper register also has its definite limitation, above which it is inaudible. But perceptivity of impressions, vibrations, varies greatly. No two individuals are exactly alike in this respect, and no faculty is more amenable to cultivation. This individual variation ranges all the way from the stupid dulness of the dolt to the exquisite sensitiveness of the clairaudient and clairvoyant. Thus, the blind feel color; the deaf feel sound, both of them through a cultivation of a fine sense of vibratory motion.

Possibly, in time, inventive genius will evolve micrometric tests of sufficient delicacy to detect and define individual variations in touch, timbre and temperament, so that we shall be able to tell why one is an artist with his brush and another with his voice; why one takes to music and another to mechanics; why Smith is a baker, and Brown a baritone, and why one woman so readily exults in high C, while the next 10,000 never get outside the middle octave of milliners' bills and domestic gossip. Even among the singers there are a thousand failures before there is a single success. Light, heat, force, motion, sound, sight, taste, thought and emotion-all these are but different forms of vibration.

The velvet of the lily, the exqisite tint of the rose, and the ethereal daintiness of the orchid, each is but some trifling variation in the timbre, the tempo or the pitch of the vibrations that produce it. Each is consummately perfect and unerringly distinctive, and each is a living refutation of the pseudo-psychic assumption that all forms,

impulses and inspirations are the results of external impressions. The rose and rhododendron grow and bloom from the same soil and amid the same environments; the thistle and thyme grow side by side; the poet and the plodder are born of the same parents, in the same house and under the same star.

The poet thinks and sings in vibratory waves of effulgent light. His lines are photographic translations of his dreams, his visions, his prophecies and his pangs. If he warbles or weeps in your key or mine we warble or weep with him. If his keynote holds itself at a foreign pitch, we are not touched; he has no message for us. If the orator assails us with his platoons of vibratory argument in notes that jar with ours, his words fall on unheeding ears. The preacher who admonishes or consoles in a foreign key fails to admonish or console. Even the bird that hoarsely croaks in discordant falsetto is classed as a bird of prey, or as a scavenger.

The artist-genius is he who has learned. the secret and mystery of modulation, is at home in all keys, brings all his hearers into harmonic touch and holds them as in a spell.

As all men worship a beautiful woman so all men worship a beautiful voice; and when the beautiful form and bewitching voice are blended all the world is captive. It is a conjugation as rare as unalloyed pleasure or perfect love. The man or woman who can look into the beautiful eyes and listen to the beautiful voice unmoved, blind and deaf to the beauties of sight and sound, is a human monster and a moral deformity. Let millstones be fastened about his neck and let him be cast into the sea of eternal oblivion.

Music is a sacrament of sound and rhythm; a marriage of measure and melody; a harmonic weaving of related and accordant vibrations. When we have learned to avail ourselves of its subtle potencies it will take rank with electricity and all the higher laws of hygiene in the field of prevention and cure. Music alone will ultimately unlock the mystery of creation and

voice the unspoken secrets of the soul! "All one's life is music, if one touches the notes rightly and in tune."-Ruskin.

"All deep things are song. See deep enough and you see musically, the heart of nature being everywhere music if you can only reach it."-Carlyle.

"He who explains music explains the universe."-Schopenhauer.

Michael Angelo declared that the secret of his conceptions was that he thought his ideals and dwelt on them until his hand kept time to the rhythm of his thought.

Beethoven!—the very name is a prophetic symphony: "In the deep tone of the syllables a presentment of immortality."

Händel caught his music "falling from the sky."

Wagner brought the sky to earth and transcribed the music of the spheres.

The pendulum of progress, in this most scientific of all the ages, is poising on the return "away from the holy mania for the realities of physical science" toward a realm of spiritual realities, spiritual equilibrium and spiritual freedom.

The latest demonstrations in physiological chemistry prove that all nerve force and action consists in a rhythmic rotation of electrons around the various elementary atoms, the nature of the action and extent of the force depending upon the rate of rotation and the circumference of the orbits.

Vibration itself is thus resolved into a procession of fluctuations on the part of a series of tangent and contrasting orbits.

Does sound a moment drop the strain, Then Silence takes it up again,

Still sweeter—as a memory
Is sweeter than the things that be.
Pleased Nature's heart is always young,
Her golden harp is ever strung,

Singing and playing, day to day,
She passes happy on her way.

Song is the exultation of a spirit winged for flight; or it is the plaint of an imprisoned spirit pleading for release. It is the cry of a lonesome soul seeking its mate, or

the symphonic prayer of a hungry heart imploring love! Throughout the ages it has struggled to make clear its mission, to announce the goal of human life, the mystery of creation, the articulate speech of spiritual existence its own language and its own longing.

Every poet has been its only partly coherent mouthpiece, frantic to translate its messages into his own tongue. Each individual is sensitive only to those impressions that are pitched in his key. Pain and the plaints are pitched in the minor keys. Passion and prayer, exultation and despair, thankfulness and remonstrance, resignation and defiance-these range throughout the scale, and wander into every key, with endless modulation and intricate blendings. There are exquisite natures whose pulses beat in rhythmic periods, and whose very breath comes and goes in phonoscopic cadences. To these life becomes a song cycle, and their only cares and troubles are its discords. From the ranks of these come all the musical marvels, the Beethovens, Mozarts and Wagners, the Marios, Linds, Pattis and De Reszkés. These are the rare voices that find adequate utterance. Eons of ages have been expended in their evolution. There are equally fine natures—a hundred to one-that forever live and breathe and thrill in a world of melody to which they can only listen in dumb appreciation. These are the dumb poets, the clairaudients, who hear and feel, but cannot utter. There are yet others to whom noise and music are synonymous. Such are the rudimentary souls who happily do not realize their own deformity.

The solemn anthems of the ocean, the flashing, crashing artillery of the clouds, the soft sighing of the summer winds, the low murmur of subsident waves, the babbling of the brook that sings its purling passage to the sea, whisperings of the forest, weird, wandering voices of the night, bird notes at dawn, the blending monotone of moving air and myriad insects, the hum of wings, rustling leaves, the throb and whir of the world's machinery-all these are the under

tone and contralto of Creation, the diapason of Destiny, the basso profundo of Fate. Everywhere sound that annihilates silence and transforms death into life! The smith at his anvil, the carpenter at his bench, the weaver at his loom, bees at work in the clover, lowing kine at the gate, the farmer husking corn, the dairymaid at her churn, the housewife crooning to her babe, the older children shouting at play, the singing kettle over the fire, humming-birds that dart like animated bullets, swift as thought, and pierce you with their sharp notes as they pierce the opening honeysuckle; the faithful watch dog at his post, the baying hound following the chase; every word that is uttered, every thought that thrills and every motion that is made-all these are etched into the air we breathe, and recorded on the ocean of luminiferous ether in which our universe forever swings. We forget them as they crowd upon each other, but the record remains; not a vibration is lost. All our experiences and expressions are photogravured in the omnipresent senstitive plate of cosmic unity, and only await the chemic touch of the central sun and the toning bath of the elements to become visible to every eye, in lines of beauty or in lines of inharmony and distortion.

Love is the culminant conjugation of two vital natures in attune. Hate is the strident discord that results from incongruous contacts and unaccordant combinations. Life is made and marred by the fortunate and unfortunate elections and selections we make. The soul is its vibrant and creative center; the body is its instrument and organ, the form through which it speaks, thinks and takes cognizance of other forms, loves, suffers, enjoys and accomplishes.

Physiologists have long recognized the existence of persistent characteristic vibrations in the three dominant systems of the human body-muscular, arterial and respiratory. The contraction of a muscle consists of either tonic or clonic vibrations. Each fasciculus is a bundle of microscopic filaments pitched and attuned in variant keys.

Every inspiration involves the vibrant activity of a million mimic Æolian harps that blend their muffled notes and culminate in the respiratory murmur, low and sweet, sweet and low as "horns from Elfland faintly blowing. And every pulsation of the heart is the baton stroke of the maestro, directing and controlling his vibrant and obedient orchestra. All these results originate in molecular vibrations of which we can have no cognizance except by watching their effects.

Systems of gymnastics approach perfection only when they are associated with rhythm and harmony.

The electric current as applied in medicine either aids or injures, according to whether its vibratory movement harmonizes with the vibratory movement and needs of the part or organ to which it is applied.

The climax of effect from rhythmic movements, harmonic gymnastics, really consists less in muscular development-well enough in its way and as far as it goesthan in developing a faculty of muscular, nervous and mental control, psychic poise, spiritual aplomb, self-reliance. What this age of nerve strain needs is nerve training and nerve tone, rather than common brawn, which is comparatively easy of acquirement. The athlete who acquires only muscle makes a lamentable failure in life, and these failures have become so common and prominent that they have begun to decidedly detract from the universal esteem in which athleticism has heretofore been held.

Americans have acquired the reputation of living at high tension. We are not content with the conventional concert pitch of the average world, but insist on one that keeps the orchestra in the upper register regardless of strain, and compels the players to do most of their practice on the shift end of the fingerboard. As a result premature collapse is too common, the only wonder being that this exaltation pitch does not cause the strings to snap sooner than they do.

It is true that within reasonable limits the higher the rate of the vibrations the finer the texture and intenser the tone of the