An American physician (W.F.  Hutchinson) has shown that anaesthesia may be produced with accurately made tuning forks at certain rates of vibration (summarized in the British Medical Journal, June 4, 1898).  Ferrand in a paper read before the Paris Academy of Medicine in September, 1895, gives reasons for classing some kinds of music as powerful antispasmodics with beneficial therapeutic action.  The case was subsequently reported of a child in whom night-terrors were eased by calming music in a minor key.  The value of music in lunatic asylums is well recognized; see e.g., Naecke, Revue de Psychiatrie, October, 1897.  Vaschide and Vurpas (Comptes Rendus de la Societe de Biologie, December 13, 1902) have recorded the case of a girl of 20, suffering from mental confusion with excitation and central motor disequilibrium, whose muscular equilibrium was restored and movements rendered more co-ordinated and adaptive under the influence of music.

While there has been much extravagance in the ancient doctrine concerning the effects of music, the real effects are still considerable.  Not only is this demonstrated by the experiments already referred to (p. 118), indicating the efficacy of musical sounds as physiological stimulants, but also by anatomical considerations.  The roots of the auditory nerves, McKendrick has pointed out, are probably more widely distributed and have more extensive connections than those of any other nerve.  The intricate connections of these nerves are still only being unraveled.  This points to an explanation of how music penetrates to the very roots of our being, influencing by associational paths reflex mechanisms both cerebral and somatic, so that there is scarcely a function of the body that may not be affected by the rhythmical pulsations, melodic progressions, and harmonic combinations of musical tones. (Nature, June 15, 1899, p. 164.)

Just as we are not entitled from the ancient belief in the influence of music on morals or the modern beliefs in its therapeutic influence—­even though this has sometimes gone to the length of advocating its use in impotence[118]—­to argue that music has a marked influence in exciting the specifically sexual instincts, neither are we entitled to find any similar argument in the fact that music is frequently associated with the love-feelings of youth.  Men are often able to associate many of their earliest ideas of love in boyhood with women singing or playing; but in these cases it will always be found that the fascination was romantic and sentimental, and not specifically erotic.[119] In adult life the music which often seems to us to be most definitely sexual in its appeal (such as much of Wagner’s Tristan) really produces this effect in part from the association with the story, and in part from the intellectual realization of the composer’s effort to translate