518 Notices of Books. ‘October, 
give it a sort of leather or parchment front. Then he tied cross- 
bars of reed to the arms, and attached seven strings of sheep- 
gut to the cross-bars. After that he tried the strings with a 
plectrum.”’ According to another account, the lyre was invented 
by the Egyptian god Thoth, who, while walking along the shores 
of the Nile, happened to strike his foot against the shell of a 
dead tortoise, containing nothing within its shell but the dried 
cartilages of the animal. He was so pleased with the sounds 
produced that he constructed a musical instrument from the 
same shell, and put strings to it of dried animal sinews. It was 
with the lyre of Hermes that Orpheus charmed Creation, and 
even tamed the furies of Hades. 
The earliest representations of musical instruments and of 
concerts are to be found among the frescoes and papyri-paintings 
of ancient Egypt. No less than thirteen different musical in- 
struments have been noticed in various papyri:—Harp, lyre, 
lute, flute, double pipes, sistrum, &c. A conductor is often seen 
beating time with his hands; sometimes one conductor for 
the instruments, another for the chorus. Some of these repre- 
sentations go back as far as the time of Moses. ‘‘We may trace 
the prototype of every Greek instrument in Egypt. No kind of 
advance upon the music of that ancient country seems to have been 
made till the three Alexandrian mathematicians, Eratosthenes, 
Didymus, and Claudius Ptolemy, appeared successively upon the 
scene, andimproved the scale. Eratosthenes, the first of them, was 
born about 276 B.c. He was director of the Alexandrian 
Library.” 
Pythagoras is believed to have imported the octave system 
from Egypt into Greece. We all know the old story of his 
having discovered it: when passing a blacksmith’s shop he 
heard the consonances of the fourth, fifth, and octave, and 
weighed the hammers. The other story of the strings is less 
trite, but equally untrue. It is said that Pythagoras took strings 
of equal thickness and length, fixed them at one end, passed 
them over a bridge, and weighted them at the other end with 
weights of 6, 8, 9, and 12 pounds. But Galileo pointed out that 
in order to get the octave, the fourth, and the fifth, from such an 
arrangement, it would be necessary that the weights should be 
the squares of 6, 8, 9, 12. The doctrine of the Harmony of the 
Spheres was based upon the octave system of music. The ear- 
liest extant notice of this system is found in some fragments 
attributed to Philolaos, who was the first to make known many 
of the doctrines of Pythagoras. 
Greek singing, according to Mr. Chappell, must often have 
severely strained the voice. In the ‘‘manly and severe ” Dorian 
scale the key-note was the tenor d in the space below the treble 
clef. Aristotle says that few persons could sing the voor ‘opprot, 
addressed to Apollo, on account of their high notes. ‘‘ Apollo 
seems to have been addressed as if he had been troubled with 
