Scan 50
The violin: its famous makers and their imitators, 1884
8 lines. Read by computer on 28 September 2026. Printed page 4. See the scan on archive.org.
1view, it need scarcely be said, is the most prolonged, extending some five thousand years along the vista of time, where little else is discoverable but what is visionary, mythical, and unsubstantial. It is related—traditionally of course—that some three thousand years before our era there lived a king of Ceylon named Ravanon,* who invented a four-stringed instrument played with a bow, and which was named after the inventor "the Ravanastron." If it were possible to identify the instrument of that name, now known to the Hindoos, as identical with that of King Ravanon—as M. Sonnerat declares it to be—the Eastern view of our subject would be singularly clear and defined. A declaration, however, resting on tradition, necessarily makes the gathering of evidence in support of it a task both dubious and difficult.†
3It is said that Sanscrit scholars have met with names for the bow in Sanscrit writings dating back
5* M. Sonnerat, "Voyage aux Indes Orientales," 1806.
7† In Mr. Engel's "Researches into the Early History of the Violin Family," 1883,—a book containing much valuable evidence on the subject—the author rightly remarks: "Now, this may be true; still it is likewise true that most of the Asiatic nations are gifted with a remarkably powerful imagination, which evidently induces them sometimes to assign a fabulously high age to any antiquity of theirs the origin of which dates back to a period where history merges in myth. At the present day the Hindoos possess, among their numerous rude instruments of the Fiddle class, an extraordinarily primitive contrivance, which they believe to be the instrument invented by Ravanon. Their opinion has actually been adopted by some of our modern musical historians as if it were a well established truth."
The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.