Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 18.djvu/254

242. Many have become obsolete, but others are still hi constant use, and are found with various modifications in all countries. They give evidence of high civilization at a very early period, not only in the costliness and rarity of the materials used, and the knowledge of the science of acoustics displayed in their production, but in the mental power required for their first conception.

The hollow-cone-shaped porcelain vases of China, that have five holes to be stopped so that the air within may be made to vibrate in certain determinate ways to produce with accuracy the notes required by the performer, are, as wind-instruments, marvels of inventive genius. The pipes of a Chinese organ are rendered dumb by a hole bored near the foot of each one, and which the player stops with his finger when the pipe is required to sound its note. Acousticians fail to comprehend this; and, although enormously large church organs are built by ourselves, we do not really know the motion of the vibrating column of air in any one pipe, the wind with which it is supplied not entering it. Nor can we tell why one stopped with a plug at the top, when sounded, vibrates violently on two of its sides, the other two remaining quiescent. Various other phenomena, that are said to be fully understood in recent works on sound, are only partially accounted for.

There is a tendency to refer all instruments to respective epochs, according to their degrees of development, partly because our pianoforte has been so rapidly elaborated from the Irish harp, which alone had a tension-bar, and our harmonium from the Chinese reed, also by the key-board appliance, and partly because consistent theories are so easily invented. We should, therefore, be on our guard in this matter, as in others, respecting chronological sequences, and remember that many instruments have been periodically simplified, as in the ease of the violin; or chosen for their simplicity, as in the case of the Greek lyre over that of the Egyptian harp, notwithstanding its extremely limited powers; and particularly the historic fact that most elaborate instruments were known in mythologic times in China.

Adopting the classification of Jubal—the sixth from Adam—"harp and organ" (commonly called "string and wind"), and adding the generally unrecorded percussive instruments to form the third genus, it is not difficult to invent a theory of development. For we may assume that the warrior's bow-string, giving a well-defined tone when pulled with the finger, led to two or more strings being systematized and plucked with the plectrum or struck with mallets, giving rise to the many forms of Egyptian harps, all of which are in the form of a bow, and have no "tension-bar" to resist the pull of the strings; then that the friction of two bows led to the violin species, by the addition and augmentation of resonating cavities for one bow and the modification of the other bow, which has only recently been made, and the addition of a finger-board.