Scan 40
The violin, its famous makers and their imitators, 1887
8 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1his brother's name was Jubal; from him descended the Flute players and Fiddlers," as rendered by Luther.
3The parts Orpheus and Apollo have been made to play in infantile Fiddle history have necessarily been dependent upon the license and the imagination of the sculptor and the medallist. Inferences of antiquity, however, have been drawn from such representations. Tracings of a bow among the sculpture of the ancients have been sought for in vain: no piece is known upon which a bow is distinguishable. A century since, an important discovery was thought to have been made by musical antiquarians in the Grand Duke's Tribuna at Florence, wherein was a small figure of Apollo playing on a kind of Violin with something of the nature of a bow. Inquiry, however, made it clear that the figure belonged to modern art. Orpheus has been represented holding a Violin in one hand and a bow in the other; inquiry again showed that the Violin and the bow were added by the restorer of the statue.
5The views held by musical historians regarding the origin of the Violin may be described by the terms, Asiatic, and Scandinavian. The Eastern view, it need scarcely be said, is the most prolonged, exceeding 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
7* M. Sonnerat, "Voyage aux Indes Orientales," 1806.
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