Books › Old violins and violin lore, 1900 › scan 27
Scan 27
Old violins and violin lore, 1900
14 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1OLD VIOLINS
3of about a hundredweight upon the belly, neck, and tailpiece, from the tension of the four strings.
5Six sycamore ribs and twelve internal blocks and linings suffice to hold the back and belly together.
7The neck carries the ebony finger-board and lifts its characteristic scroll or head—so expressive that makers can almost be recognised by its physiognomy.
9The neck is let solidly into the ribs and fastened against the lower part of the belly. When firmly glued it is extremely difficult to detach it, and once only in my experience has the neck of a violin proved unequal to support the enormous pull made upon it by the strings.
11It was in Ceylon. The heat was intense and moist. I had borrowed a violin for experimental purposes in one of my lectures at Colombo. In the middle of an attempted passage the neck quietly doubled up; the strings fell in a loose cluster. The glue had liquefied, and the whole fiddle came to pieces in my hands. What no time nor wear and tear had been able to effect had been suddenly achieved by the peculiar hothouse, vapour-bath treatment of the tropics.
13The early viol-makers no doubt at first selected their wood empirically; but it soon became an established rule to take a soft wood for the belly and a hard wood for the back. If all were soft, the sound would be muffled and tubby; if all were hard, the sound would be metallic and light; neither must the thickness of back and front be uniform—each must be thicker
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