Books › The fiddle fancier's guide; a manual of information regarding violins, violas, basses and bows of classical and modern times, together with biographical notices and portraits of the most famous performers on these instruments, 1892 › scan 20
Scan 20
The fiddle fancier's guide; a manual of information regarding violins, violas, basses and bows of classical and modern times, together with biographical notices and portraits of the most famous performers on these instruments, 1892
2 lines. Read by computer on 29 August 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1diplomatic mission saw it, while a three or four hundred year old Welsh poem minutely describing an instrument then in existence is to be rejected as evidence of that existence for no reason whatever—unless it be that "people always say these things when they possess something peculiar, the origin of which they are unable to trace"—the Burmese people, of course, alone excepted. I merely mention this to show how lightly scientific modes of reasoning weigh sometimes with cultured minds, and how utterly unreliable are the conclusions which are drawn in such fashion. If the circumstance that the name of the Burmese "Thro," derived from a Sanskrit root sarva, meaning "entire" or "universal" be considered an element sufficiently weighty to make evidence pointing to its Oriental origin, why should I hesitate to trace the Welsh Cruth in a much more direct manner to the Hebrew participle Cruth signifying "cut" or "engraved?" It has never been suggested before, but suppose I do so in this Fiddle Fanciers's Guide merely to show how easy it is to work out a plausible conclusion on paper with the aid of etymology. The ancient Eastern lyre had an arched back cut and engraved to imitate the shell of a tortoise. The Greeks, who had their letters—if not their literature and sciences—largely from the cities of the plain, seeing this, called it chelys (χέλυς) their name for a tortoise, and the Romans called it testudo, which is the Latin name for the same creature, and also, secondarily, for any stringed instrument whose body is of an arched character. Now, how is it that the Anglo-Saxons and the Welsh, alone among all occidental peoples, retained the original Hebrew
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