Scan 406
Catalogue of the Crosby Brown Collection of musical instruments, 1914
12 lines. Read by computer on 13 September 2026. Printed page 266. See the scan on archive.org.
1described by Hamy,1 who gives the native name as quinquer caline. These were doubtless of Araucanian origin. Guevara2 mentions the same bows made of willow and strung with horsehair, the native name differing slightly, i.e., quinque cahue.
3In the opinion of Lehmann-Nitsche, these complex forms found in Patagonia are probably an original combination of old European instruments, i.e., the large bow for the bass or cello combined with some kind of a flute,3 especially as the Tehulches try to blow upon the bone with which they rub the string—and the holes found in the decorated specimens were originally not purely ornamental as they are now. The only solution offered by this writer as to the origin of this type is that the bow may have been imported by African slaves who were brought there after the Spanish Conquest, and, after the removal of the African influence, the bow was developed and combined by the natives in different ways, resulting in a hybrid form. The use of a bone in connection with the bow appears again in the ha-hai-shim of the Yokaia Indians of California who use a bone plectrum to strike the string of the bow that, like the bow of the Araucanians, is held between the teeth. In this instance, however, the bone in no way resembles a flute.
5As to when or where the musical bow first made its appearance on this continent, history gives us no clue other than that of transmission from Africa through the West Indian slave trade; nor does archaeological research afford the necessary proof of its use among the aborigines. Recent excavations as well as those of the past have produced only objects of pottery and bronze, with occasional fragments of weaving, impossible to date, but which seem to correspond to the predynastic period of Egyptian art (prior to 3400 B.C.). Such fragments of stringed instruments as have survived in Egypt date from about 1600 B.C., although the use of harps as early as 2700 is recorded in a relief of the Fifth Dynasty; but neither in Mexico nor in South America have any traces of the string form been found either in carvings or among the funerary objects exhumed. The same is also true with the Indian mounds north of Mexico, those of the middle west and California producing only
71. Hamy. Étude sur les collections Américaines réunies à Gênes à l’occasion du IVe centenaire de la Découverte de l’Amérique. In Journal de la Société des Américanistes de Paris, vol. I, 1895–96.
92. Guevara. Historia de la civilizacion de Araucania. In Anales de la Universidad de Chile, vol. 104, p. 502. 1899.
113. The instrument thus developed, combining as it does a flute and a stringed instrument, suggests a primitive form of the combination found in Provence, the chirula and the tambourin à cordes, and as well the Elizabethan pipe and tabor.
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