Page:The Early English Organ Builders and their work.djvu/31

 consisted in drawing these to and fro, as the sounds of the various pipes they covered were required. It had four hundred pipes, and twenty-six pair of bellows; but as it had no wind-chest this number was required to supply the unusually large number of pipes.

All doubts upon the matter, should any exist, may be set at rest by a perusal of Theophilus' valuable treatise upon the "Art of Organ Building," a work of the latter part of the eleventh century to which I was the first to call attention in my "History of the Organ." No one, after reading the worthy monk's curious directions for organ building, will question the primitive state of the art at this early period.

I may also, in passing, correct an error which has become very prevalent as regards a similar organ, of the same date, described as being in Westminster Abbey. Dom. Bedos, and after him Mason, La Trobe, Wackerbarth, Professor Pole, Seidel, Ashpitel, and a host of others, all