Page:The Early English Organ Builders and their work.djvu/27

 novel organ has lately been erected by the Prince Brancaforte, upon a hill in his park, near Messina: it is supplied with wind by a wind-mill, and can be distinctly heard two or three miles distant."

Probably the Italian prince thought that he had hit upon a novelty when he erected his wind-mill organ; but we now find that his device had been anticipated more than eighteen hundred years before.

Organs were early introduced into the Christian Church—indeed at a much earlier period than is commonly assigned. According to Julianus, a Spanish bishop who flourished in 450, they were in use in his time. Aldhelm the Anglo-Saxon, who died in 709, mentions them, and speaks of the gilding of the external pipes. This passage in the De Laude Virginum, as Mr. Sharon Turner justly observes, is alone sufficient to refute the generally received story of Muratori, that