seven colors, seven planets, seven notes, septive?

[Brian D. McCary]

If Newton did want corrospondance between the notes of the scale and
the colors, and from Malcolm Saunders' comments, it sounds like he did,
then it seems to me he was trying to force to a somewhat arbitrary 
scheme, since there are eight notes in an octive.  Otherwise, of course,
it would be a septive, right?  The note we all forget in these evenly
tempered times would be the flatted seventh, which, in the key of C,
those retentive Germans occasionally refered to as H, at least through the
time of Beethoven.   It shows up all the time in pop music, in dominant
seventh chords just before the resolution to the tonic (some sort of short
story in that theme...) and corrosponds to the 14th overtone in the 
harmonic series, where the eighth through the fifteenth overtones make up 
the notes of the octave.  I can't recall when the harmonic scale was 
abandoned for the 12 note tempered scale, but for some reason, I thought
it was after Newton.

Which just goes to show that scientists are just as prone to ritualization
and fetishism as anyone else.  I believe it was Kepler who "proved" that 
there where only five planents, because there were only 5 perfect 
solids, which fit the known planitary orbits....

Brian McCary