The following treatise, portions of which have been delivered in lectures at the South Kensington Museum, the Royal Academy of Music, and elsewhere, aims at placing before persons unacquainted with Mathematics an intelligible and succinct account of that part of the Theory of Sound which constitutes the physical basis of the Art of Music. No preliminary knowledge, save of Arithmetic and of the musical notation in common use, is assumed to be possessed by the reader. The importance of combining theoretical and experimental modes of treatment has been kept steadily in view throughout. The author has incorporated the chief Acoustical discoveries of Professor Helmholtz, but adopted his own course in explaining them and developing their connection with the previously established portion of the subject. The present volume, therefore, even where its obligations to the great German philosopher are the deepest, is not a mere epitome of his work1, but the result of independent study. 1878.
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