Books › The violin, how to make it, 1880 › scan 17
Scan 17
The violin, how to make it, 1880
4 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 11. See the scan on archive.org.
1has been dug from the Oriental mines. There are strange analogies in Nature which modern scientists despise to recognize. The Rosicrucian theory, that the whole universe is a musical instrument, which is the Pythagorean doctrine of the Music of the Spheres, may be not so foolish after all, for sounds and colors are spiritual numerals; and as the seven prismatic rays proceed from one spot in heaven, so the seven powers of Nature, each a number, are the seven radiations of the Unity, the Central Sun of all. In the god Heptaktis — so hideously and malevolently misrepresented by our ignorant missionaries — the seven rays of the Solar Spectrum are represented concretely. The Seven epitomized into Three primary rays, viz., Red, Blue, and Yellow, form the Solar Trinity, typifying respectively Spirit, Matter, and Spirit-Essence. Science of late has reduced the seven rays to three primary ones, and thus corroborates the scientific conception of the ancients of at least one of the visible manifestations of the invisible Deity, and the seven divided into a quaternary and a trinity. The seventh ray of the prismatic spectrum — the blue-violet — which is the most powerfully chemical and magnetic of all, corresponds with the highest note in the musical scale, and like this scale the chemical rays increase in power as you ascend the spectrum from the red to the violet.
3Experiments made by that delicate acoustic re-agent, the sensitive flame, prove the analogy between the same notes of a gamut and the sympathy among individual colors in the spectrum. An incandescent body that produces a particular bright band in the rear of the spectrum, will, when in a gaseous state, absorb light and cause a dark band in exactly the same part of the scale. As all the complex music of an orchestra is the result of a few simple notes variously combined, so all the tints of a picture are the results of a few simple colors varied. The musical scale asserts the complex notes in one case, the spectrum asserts the complex colors in the other. If we express the wavelengths of the notes by relative measurements, adopting Listing's determinations of wave-lengths, and take C as 100, then all the other notes have this wave-lengths expressed in percentages. Similarly, Red is taken at 100, and the wavelengths of other colors are expressed in per centages. Upon
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