Scan 36
The Fiddle Fancier's Guide: A Manual of Information Regarding Violins …, 1892
4 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1well pause when we are asked to believe that certain other instruments were not known at all, merely because no trace of them has been found in literary or artistic remains. In face of a circumstance like this, I shall not venture at present to follow too dogmatically any particular line of classification in dealing with the ancestry of the violin. I will merely point out that among all the forms which have been marshalled to show their kinship to the monarch of string instruments, not one of the earlier species has a sound-post except the old viols. That circumstance alone is, in my view, sufficient to prove their direct descent from the cruth, which, although it had no sound post in the sense in which we now understand that term, namely a movable sound post, it certainly had one in principle—the long, left foot of the bridge going through the left sound hole and being supported on the inside of the back.
3The only other instrument which has been set up—with any particular claims to notice—as the ancestor of the violin is the rebab. It, however, had no sides, and although it may be called a contemporary of the cruth—seeing that illustrations of it have been found as far back as the ninth century—I am afraid its claims must be lightly passed over. Its form was that of a heart-shaped block of wood, hollowed out and narrowed towards the handle. It had, at different times, one, two, and three strings, and its name rebab—supposed to be an Arabic word—is quoted as meaning "emitting melancholy sounds." I think this derivation is a mistake. The word rebab is, I fancy, an Arabic variation of the old Hebrew word "lebab"—the Hebrew letters r and
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