is full grown at birth, and long before a baby can speak, its key board (or Corti's organ) is vibrating with the activity of microscopic strings that analyse and place myriad sounds and tones. What does the baby know of all this? Nothing. He can sing—he can play if there is nothing to hinder. If the right stimulus is given, the music will begin. Tolstoy, Hearn, and many others, have testified, after working among children and peasants, that they are nearly all capable of a wonderful musical development. If this does not take place in many to-day, it is only because there is something that actually hinders it, or because there is nothing to call it forth.
We do not circulate our own blood, but it is circulated in us. We do not consciously make our food change into muscle and nerve, or bone; we are not chemists, and we certainly could not, by taking thought, elaborate all the juices and acids that are formed in us daily. Yet those changes take place in us. Just in the same way the peasants of Russia or Scotland (to whom the greatest composers have gone for their themes) do not "make" this music. It sings in them. An instrument (which is, of course, not a part, but the whole organism and its life) is played on, and it pours forth its strange human music like an æolian harp through which all the
