Books › The story of the violin, 1904 › scan 50
Scan 50
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.
1Family Likeness
3Nay—who knows?—perhaps the mean-looking ravanastron is but the degenerate descendant from instruments too far from us removed in time to even think out; a piece of antediluvian wreckage which slipped out of the arms of oblivion; a fragment of earliest civilisations; a lost ray from the dawn of the world when man yet walked with God.
5Enough, when the Hindoos occupied India and brought with them the vina, their national favourite instrument (which tradition also says they received from Nared, the son of Saraswinta, Brahma's wife), it would not be unreasonable to suppose that the ravanastron and its brothers of the bowed kind (if there were any then) had to take a second place as a legacy of a conquered and despised people. Eventually it sunk still further in the esteem of a victorious race until it became relegated to the hut of the lowly and poor in the land, who alone kept up its use and kingly memories.. So much of speculation on this supposed inventor of the ravanastron. Be its story and age now what it may, it is certainly a very primitive invention, and as a musical instrument would hardly deserve the attention it gets from the musical
7the Chinese Emperor Fuhi, of the Egyptian god Thoth, and the Apollo of the Greeks, etc., what are they but variations of the same thought?—music leaving its eternal abode in heaven, and descending to earth through the instrumentality of gods and super-men. A strange coincidence, by the way, this mythical high birth of our art, with the biblical testimony to the high birth of man—which our materialists are trying their best to gainsay.
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