Books › Old violins and violin lore, 1900 › scan 153
Scan 153
Old violins and violin lore, 1900
15 lines. Read by computer on 28 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1OLD VIOLINS
3dragon's blood, a resinous gum from the Draconian Draco, does not seem now to be commonly forthcoming. The Calami Draco of Borneo has taken its place. The old dragon's blood has been much talked about, and credited with giving a certain splendid sanguineous flush to some of the rare Cremonese bellies upon which the judicious amateur dotes.
5And now, what is amber varnish? The usual answer is, there is no such thing. Certainly it was never used by Stradivari, for it is said the secret of fusing that hard gum was only discovered by Martin the chemist in 1737, the year of Stradivari's death. On the other hand, I hear that amber has been found in the varnish of Giuseppe del Gesù—by what analysis I do not know. The usual way of rubbing a violin and smelling the surface has always seemed to me to furnish a most unreliable test. One saith, "I smell benzoin;" or another, "I smell mastic;" and a third, "I smell amber;" and a fourth, "I smell nought;" and this battle of olfactory organs is like to go on, as saith the poet—
7"As long as man has passions,
8As long as life has woes;"
10or, as we may say—
12"As long as man has nose."
14So here I desire to take my leave of this thorny subject, and with a sense of relief I abandon crucibles to the expert, and oils and resins to the disputatious, merely reminding our collectors for practical purpose that the Brescian varnish is soft and brown, but with-
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