Books › The story of the violin, 1904 › scan 51
Scan 51
The story of the violin, 1904
6 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1Story of the Violin
3historian but for that one feature of it, the bow. It is the bow first and the bow last, as every violinist knows; and yet the bow even—that magic wand in the hand of a Paganini which opens wondrous worlds of sound—how easy an invention it really seems here, in its first crude form: the simple principle of producing sounds from strings by friction, that is all. What could be more natural than that the same bow, which men learned almost from the first to employ as a means of subsistence and as a weapon, nay, from which he probably derived the design for his first harp—should have by accident or reflection revealed to him the possibility of sounding strings otherwise than by picking with the fingers or a plectrum.1 But that brings us to the interesting question: Have really no nations of antiquity, other than the Hindoos, known bowed instruments? This seems hardly possible.
51 A small piece of horn or bone with which to pick the strings.
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