Scan 43
The Fiddle Fancier's Guide: A Manual of Information Regarding Violins …, 1892
2 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1as yet been able satisfactorily to explain. A great many people have, from time to time, advanced more or less plausible reasons for this important betterment of violin tone through kindly treatment and the beneficent influences of the lapse of years, but the best of these explanations are merely careful examinations of, and researches into, the mechanism of phenomena which have nothing to do with the question of improvement of tone, but only concern its production or existing quality. If a scientist were to set about subjecting to practical analysis the constitution of one of the eternal verities, he would probably find himself involved in conditions of work and experiment, which would render his efforts of little use to his fellow man, and although I daresay it will not be found quite so hard a task to investigate the causes of improvement in violin tone, I do not think it will be accomplished in a trustworthy manner under present limitations. To shake together, as it were in a box, a few choice selections from a technical terminology and sprinkle them, with a little ink and more or less taste and skill, over the surface of a sheet of paper is one way of explaining this curious phenomenon—and a good many other much more important phenomena, be it said, without offence—but it is never resorted to by genuinely scientific writers. It is the stock-in-trade of the secondary hand, who, having nothing particular to say, but, convinced in deadly earnest that he must say something for his own preservation, rushes with a sensation of fierce hunger in his literary stomach, and clutches at the little store of some patient worker who has modestly placed the results of his
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