Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 July 1876 — Music and Pain. [ARTICLE]

Music and Pain.

■ Many eminent philoaonhersand physicians have held that music has power to affect the whole nervous system as well as the mind, so as in certain disorders to give temporary relief and even t perfect cure. It u true that the accounts that come down to us from old times take on something of the supernatural In regard to the curative power of music. A fever, it is said, is cured by an ode, deqfbesa by a< trumpet, and the pestilence is chased away by the lyre. Music, says Pope, the fiercest grief can charm. • Homer tells us the Grecian army employed music to stay the raging of the plague; and we find David making use of his harp to remove the mental derangement of Saul.. Man, however, is not the only creature which God has made which is.susceptible to music. Naturalists tell us that animals and birds, as well as “knotted oaks,” as Congreve informs us, are sensible to the charms of music. This may serve as an instance: An officer was confined in the Bastila. He begged the Governor to permit him the use of his lute to soften, by tiie harmonies of the instrument, the rigors of his prison. At the end of a few days this modern Orpheus, playing on his lute, was greatly astonished to see flocking out of their holes great numbers of mice, and descending from their woven habitations crowds of spiders, who formed a circle about him, while he continued phnring his soul-subduing instrument. IMS surprise was at first so great that he wfts petrified with astonishment. When having ceased to play the assembly, who did not come to see his person, but to hear his instrument, immediately broke up. As he had a great dislike to spidersit was two days before he ventured again to touch his instrument. At length, hating conquered for the novelty of tils company his dislike of them, he recommenced his concert, when the assembly was by far more numerous than at first, and in the oourse of further time lie found himself surrounded by a hundred musical amateurs.—Washington Chronicle.