520 Notices of Books. [O¢tober, 
‘‘ floating upon the surface of music has been for ages more 
popular than diving.” 
We come now to the eighth chapter of the ‘‘ History,” which 
is important, inasmuch as it contains three Greek hymns, written 
out in accordance with our modern notation, and supposed to be 
the only trustworthy remains of Greek music. They were first 
published by Vincenzo Galilei, the father of the astronomer, in 
1581, and were copied from Greek MS. in the library of Cardinal 
St. Angelo. The date of the hymns is uncertain, but it is not 
considered probable that they are older than from the second to 
the fourth century, A.D. The first is a hymn to Calliope, with 
an accompaniment in the Hypo-Lydian mode by George Mac- 
farren; the second a hymn to Apollo, both grave and solemn, 
and something like some of the graver hymns of the Catholic 
Church; the third, a hymn to Nemesis, is by far the most 
striking of the three, and contains a very definite and distinctive 
theme. 
A curious example of the delicacy of the human ear is to be 
found in the fact that the so-called ‘‘Comma of Didymus,” the 
interval between a major and a minor tone, or between the 80th 
and 81st part of a vibrating string, sufficed to produce the great 
change between the scale of Pythagoras and the scale which we 
now use. The harmonic scale was developed during the last 
century ; it was discovered in 1673, by William Noble, of Merton 
College, and Thomas Pigot, of Wadham. It is the scale of 
natural sounds arising from the successive aliquot divisions of a 
string, and, according to Mr. Chappell, it forms the basis of the 
science of music. 
The last four chapters of Mr. Chappell’s book are devated to 
an account of the musical instruments of the ancients :—Various 
kinds of pipes, and the way in which they were sounded, and 
the materials of which they were made—lotus, laurel, palm- 
wood, pine-wood, box-wood, beech-wood, elder-wood, ivory, 
reeds of various kinds, leg-bones of animals and of large birds 
(such as the eagle, vulture, and kite). Then there were pipes 
receiving their name from the country in which they were in- 
vented—as Alexandrian, Tuscan, Theban, Scythian, Phoenician, 
Lybian, Arabian, Phrygian. The Theban pipes were made of 
the thigh-bones of a fawn, and were covered with metal. ‘The 
length of Arabian pipes was proverbial, and a man of whose 
tongue there seemed to be no end was called an Arabian piper.” 
The ‘sweet monaulos”’ was for weddings, and the Phrygian 
pipes were ‘‘for wailing and lamenting.” After wind instru- 
ments come instruments of percussion, such as the drum, 
dulcimer, timbrel, sistrum, cymbals, and krotala. According to 
Mr. Chappell the sistrum was simply shaken, so as to produce a 
jingling sound; Plutarch has given a long account of the instru- 
ment. The Assyrians appear to have had a sistrum of a different 
form, which was struck by a rod of metal serving as a plectrum. 
