Music has been resorted to as a means of attracting rats, mice, and other mischievous animals, from out of their abodes. In the “Magazine of Natural History,” it is stated, that the steward of a ship, infested with rats, used to play some lively airs on a flute after he had baited his traps and placed them near the rat holes. The music, we are told, attracted the rats, who entered the traps unconscious of that danger, which, without this allurement, they would have instinctively avoided. In this way, it is said, the steward bagged from fifteen to twenty rats in about three hours. The mouse is no less pleased with music. “I have seen,” says a writer on this subject, “several mice regularly come out of their holes and run about a school-room, whenever the boys were singing psalms.” An officer, confined in the Bastile, at Paris, begged to be allowed to play on his lute, to soften his confinement by its harmonies. Shortly afterwards, when playing on the instrument, he was much astonished to see a number of mice frisking out of their holes, and many spiders descending from their webs, and congregating round him while he continued the music. Whenever he ceased, they dispersed; whenever he played again, they re-appeared. He soon had a far more numerous, if not a more respectable audience, amounting in all to about a hundred mice and spiders.
Sir Everard Home is disposed to think the elephant does not possess a musical ear. Suetonius tells us, however, that the Emperor Domitian had a troop of elephants disciplined to dance to the sound of music, and that one of them, which had been beaten for not having his lesson perfect, was observed on the following night to be practising by himself in a meadow.
The enterprising and lamented Clapperton informs us, that when he was departing on a warlike expedition from lake Muggaby, he had convincing proofs that the hippopotami are very sensibly affected by musical sounds, even by such as are not of the softest kinds. As the expedition passed along the banks of the lake at sunrise, these uncouth and stupendous animals “followed the drums of the different chiefs the whole length of the water, sometimes approaching so close to the shore that the water they spouted from their mouths reached the persons who were passing along the bank. I counted fifteen at one time sporting on the surface; and my servant Columbus shot one of them in the head, when he gave so loud a roar, while he buried himself in the lake, that all the others disappeared in an instant.”
M. Le Cat remarks, that the horse becomes highly animated at the sound of a trumpet. Franzius says, “the horse is very much delighted with any musical instrument, for he is observed sometimes even to weep with joy at it, but most of all he is pleased at the sound of a trumpet. Pliny, speaking of horses, mentioneth a sort of people in Italy that taught their horses to dance to the sound of a trumpet, which they used to do at great feasts; and therefore, when the enemy waged war with them, they had the best trumpets they could get, by which the enemy’s horses were so transported that they would leap and dance, and run with their masters on their backs into their enemy’s camp.”
“And when the drum beats briskly in the gale,
The war-worn courser charges at the sound,
And with young vigor wheels the pasture round.”
Rogers’s Pleasures of Memory, Part I.
Shakespeare has taken notice of the horse’s sensibility to music, in the following passage:—
“Then I beat my tabor,