Books › The story of the violin, 1904 › scan 43
Scan 43
The story of the violin, 1904
8 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1CHAPTER III.
3A FAMILY LIKENESS.
5In India then is found to the present day a something in the shape of a bow instrument which might possibly be the lowly grandsire of the king of instruments. It would not be the first time that the most humble attained eventually to the most exalted position, though in this case it requires some credulity—or, let us say, some ready fancy to discover even a faint relation between a modern violin and this extremely primitive and miserable-looking affair, the ravanastron. Yet both share the one feature which distinguishes them from all other instruments of the ancients, as far as we can judge of them—viz., the bow. That wonderful contrivance, that right hand of the fiddle, without which even a "Strad." is all but useless, for which we have vainly looked on Grecian, Egyptian, and Chaldean bas-reliefs, here, in India, we find it. It is the unmistakable family likeness which links together the old and the new, the crude and the perfect, the ravanastron and the sovereign Strad.
7Let us now look a little more closely into the claim of this supposed ancestor of bow instruments.
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