On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music.: Translated with the author's sanction from the third German edition, with additional notes and an additional appendix by Alexander J. Ellis.

THE BASIS OF OUR MODERN UNDERSTANDING OF OUR SENSE OF HEARING

first edition in English tall 8vo. xxiv, 824pp., numerous wood-engraved illustrations and figures, contemporary half dark green leather, marbled paper on sides, some scattered minor pen sidelines and a few trivial marks, neatly rebacked with the original spine relaid and with a new maroon title label, new endpapers, corners and board edges scuffed. A very good copy.

Very unobtrusive and rather attractive contemporary blind stamp of Queen's College Belfast on title page, their small and attractive gilt-blocked arms in top spine panel.

Helmholtz (1821-1894) exerted incalculable influence on nineteenth century science both through his seminal researches in the fields of energetics, physiological acoustics, physiological optics, hydrodynamics, and electrodynamics as well as through his brilliant popular lectures and his activities as a great teacher and important scientific administrator.
When Helmholtz, who "belonged to that brilliant and self-conscious generation of German scientists which arose in open reaction to the scientific romanticism of earlier decades ... abandoned physiology for physics in 1871, the former science, he complained had already grown too complex for any individual to embrace in its entirety. At his death in 1894, that complexity had become true of virtually all fields. Helmholtz was the last scholar whose work, in the tradition of Leibnitz, embraced all the sciences, as well as philosophy and the fine arts" [Dictionary Scientific Biography]
This great work, first published in 1863, made major advances in our understanding not only of the nature and structure of the partial tones associated with a fundamental frequency, but also formulated the resonance theory of hearing which, with essentially minor modifications, is the basis of our modern understanding of that sense.