Books › The history of the violin, and other instruments played on with the bow from the remotest times to the present. Also, an account of the principal makers, English and foreign, with numerous illustrations, 1864 › scan 31
Scan 31
The history of the violin, and other instruments played on with the bow from the remotest times to the present. Also, an account of the principal makers, English and foreign, with numerous illustrations, 1864
4 lines. Read by computer on 29 August 2026. Printed page 11. See the scan on archive.org.
1Stringed and bowed instruments are mentioned by travellers in many countries, but they are generally of a simple, and often of a rude form, and to none can we look for the origin of our violin. The Tatars, the modern Greeks and Egyptians, even the Africans have them. Bowditch, in his "Mission to Ashantee," describes one used by the natives from the interior, made from a calabash, with a deer-skin at the top, having two large sound-holes, one broad string made of cow-hair, and the bow strung with the same material. Layard mentions the Bedouins who attended him chanting verses to the monotonous tones of a one-stringed fiddle, made of a gourd covered with sheepskin. Prince Youssoupow also, in his "Luthomonographie," relates having met with travelling orchestras of Persians, Turks, and Armenians, in which there were instruments of the violin class, but without its tone or regular form, being commonly made of half a gourd, or sometimes hollowed wood covered with a piece of bladder, having three or four strings. The prince is in favour of the Eastern origin of the violin, thinking it was brought to Spain by the Moors in the eighth century, but whatever instruments they had were probably more of the guitar or lute kind. Du Halde refers to a kind of violin with three silken strings, in China, used by the common people; and Sir Joseph Banks saw one in Iceland of a clumsy form, with four copper strings and frets; this, however, might have been adopted from Norway or Sweden. Sir Edward Belcher mentions those of the Asiatic Esquimaux, and their skill on violins of their own manufacture.
3The Arabs, besides their lute, or guitar, or mandolin, of which Laborde, in his somewhat fanciful "History of Music," mentions a species having no less than a hundred frets, and the neck of which must, therefore, have rivalled
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