With all this wonderful ingenuity in dividing' off the range
of sounds for use and defining the units exactly, it appears
that the Persians and Arabians had but an uncertain sense
of what we call a tonic, and, as far as can be gathered, stopped
short of classifying the notes in accordance with their artistic
functions, just as the Greeks seem to have done.
In strong contrast to the Persians the inhabitants of the
great Indian peninsula appear to have sedulously avoided
applying mathematics to their scales ; and though the Indian
scales are even more complicated and numerous than the
Persian, they have been handed down from generation to
generation for ages, purely by aural tradition. Unfortunately
this avoidance of mathematics has caused the subject of
Indian scales to be extremely obscure, and the extraordinarily
high-flown imagery which is used in Indian treatises on music
renders the unravelling of their system the more difficult.
