Derived from the Latin punctus contra punctum, “point counter point” signifies “note against note,” which may be depicted by a vertical line and dots representing a chord, the basis of harmony (Erickson 3; Huxley, Letters 296 n272). The phrase clearly implies a musical motif, but its ultimately becoming the title of Huxley’s new work was the decision of his American publisher, Doubleday Doran and Company, and not his own, a fact that reinforces the idea that music was not part of the author’s original conception behind the novel. In fact, Point Counter Point replaced the title that Huxley himself had expected to use, “Diverse Laws,” a phrase he extracted from a stanza near the end of Mustapha (1609), a closet-drama by Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, based on atrocities in sixteenth-century Turkey.