ns, 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.

Polybius, the Greek historian of the second century B. C., wrote that
music softened the manners of the ancient Arcadians, whose climate was
rigorous. Whereas the inhabitants of Cynaetha (the modern town of
Kalavrita) in the Peloponnesus, who neglected this art, were the most
barbarous in Greece. Baron de Montesquieu, in "The Spirit of Laws,"
remarked that as the popular exercises of wrestling and boxing had a
natural tendency to render the ancient Grecians hardy an