Scan 42
The violin, its famous makers and their imitators, 1887
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1The inquiry is simplified from the point of view of a Violinist if we reject all bow-progenitors but those which have been strung with fibre, silk, hair, or other material, the properties of which would permit of the production of sustained sounds. Implements less developed belong to a separate order of sound-producing contrivances, namely plectra, and may be described as permitting strumming by striking in place of twanging or twitching the strings. The imperfect knowledge we have of instruments of the Fiddle kind in Europe, belonging to a period many centuries later than that we are now considering, points to their having been struck or strummed, and not bowed with a view to the sounds being sustained.
3The oldest known representation of a contrivance or instrument upon which a string is stretched with a peg to adjust its tension, is probably that described by Dr. Burney as having been seen by him at Rome on an Egyptian obelisk. In a notice of Claudius Ptolemeus, an Egyptian, who wrote upon harmonic sounds about the middle of the second century, we have an illustration of an instrument of a similar character to that found on the obelisk above noticed.1 In all probability neither of these contrivances was intended to be used as a musical instrument further than for scientific purposes, as a means of testing the tension of strings and the division of the scale: in short, they were monochords and dichords.
5In following the Eastern branch of our subject, it is necessary to refer to the suggested Arabian origin of the Ribeca of the Italians and the Rebec of the French—a little bowed instrument, shaped like the half of a pear, and having therefore something of the character of the mando-
71 Sir John Hawkins' History.
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