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Scan 193
Old Violins And Their Makers, 1883
4 lines. Read by computer on 30 September 2026. Printed page 179. See the scan on archive.org.
1of reason as any other people could display, claim to be the original inventors of the parent violin, and the earliest performers of violin music; for the bottle gourd—so called, not from its shape, but because it has a hard outer covering or shell-like skin, and is used, when hollowed, as a vessel for containing liquid—seems to be about the most primitive form of the fiddle, and with tropical shells found on the tops of our mountains, cave lions in the beds of our valleys, and other prehistoric indications of the former prevalence of a warmer climate, we might boldly premise that even the bottle gourd was at some time indigenous to this soil. But, although we might be able to make, in this way, a claim equal to that of any other race, it would not be a better one, for the first-mentioned means of producing sound from a string would almost seem to be one of those intuitive conceptions with which humanity is supposed to be endowed, as it is as widely prevalent among early folk as is the notion of the Deluge, and has come down from the dawn of human society to the present day, when our civilised schoolboys still employ it as a means of distracting their idle moments. The gourd instruments appear to be almost as universal among peoples in a natural state who can procure them. A specimen of this primitive form, having the body made of a huge pumpkin, and the strings of the tough fibres of a creeping plant, was exhibited at South Kensington in 1872.
3From the bottle gourd to the Ravanastron would be a good jump, but no ray of light illumines the darkness of the gulf by which these two are separated. It is said that Indian tradition ascribes the invention, or, at
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