Aprils, 1876] 



NATURE 



445 



viols had six strings, the Spaniards increased the number 

 upon their guitars to six, and termed them vihuelas, with- 

 out adopting the distinctive feature of the viol — the bow. 

 " No es otra cosa esta guitarra sino una vihuela quitada 

 la sexta y la prima cuerda," says Juan Bermudo, in 1555, — 

 " This guitar is no other than a vihuela deprived of its 

 first and sixth string" — but M. Engel has, by mistake, 

 given the name of vihuela to the earliest guitars with four 

 strings, as upon the portico of the church of Sant-Jago 

 di Compostella, and others. In England, in the sixteenth 

 century, the vihuelas were termed Spanish viols, and are 

 so named among the musical instruments left by Henry 

 VIII., but eventually they weie reinstated in the name of 

 Spanish guitars, while the old English cittern, strung with 

 wire, and the number of strings increased from four to six 

 (single or double), was the guitar of the last century. M. 

 Engel has not recognised this change. The English 

 had also a small instrument with four catgut strings, very 

 like the four-stringed Spanish guitar called the gittern, or 

 ghittern. It differed chiefly from the Spanish instrument 

 in having a lute-shaped back instead of a flat one. M. 

 Engel does not explain how this instrument differed from 

 the guitar, although he has given to another its Latinised 

 name, quinterna or guinterna. 



Again, it is not in accordance with English usage to 

 term large pieces of bamboo partially split, in order that, 

 by shaking them, the sides may be rattled together, 

 " castanets ; " neither were castanets called crotala by the 

 ancients, as M. Engel supposes. The ancient castanets 

 were made of nut-shells, cockles, oyster-shells, or small 

 pieces of metal, and were called kretubala. "And beating 

 down the limpets from the rocks," says Hermippus, " they 

 made a noise like castanets " {Kpefx^akl^ova-i). The krotala 

 were maces and other large and loud rattles to be used in 

 the worship of Cybele. Sometimes the two parts were 

 detached and held in two hands, and sometimes they had 

 a hinge or spring at one end, to be sounded by closing 

 the, hand suddenly so as to knock one against the 

 other. The stork was called crotalistria, from the noise 

 made by the bird in striking together the two bones of its 

 beak. 



M. Engel's history is a little at fault when he writes 

 that " The earliest organs had only about a dozen pipes," 

 and that " The largest, which were made about 900 years 

 ago, had only three octaves, in which the chromatic in- 

 tervals did not appear" (p. 108). This passage must be 

 looked upon only as a prelude, intended to magnify, by 

 contrast, the improvements which have been made in 

 Germany and other parts of the Continent of late years. 

 It can have no other meaning — for the organ at Winchester 

 had 400 pipes in the tenth and eleventh centuries. It is 

 fully described by a contemporary musician, the author 

 of a once celebrated, but now lost, treatise, De Tonorum 

 Harmonia. Two lines of extract will suffice :— • 



" Sola quadringentas quae sustinet ordine musas, 

 Quas manus organici temperat ingenij." 



Wolstan's Lift: of St. Swithun. 

 M. Engel makes also a mistake of from 400 to 500 

 years in the date of a manuscript, and, acting upon this 

 mistake, he claims priority for Germany over England 

 for the first use of the fiddle-bow. Strings have but a 

 fleeting tone, unless it be sustained by friction, and the 

 principle is so simple as to be intelligible at one glance, 



and therefore to be readily adopted. But the first ex- 

 ample yet discovered is in an Anglo-Saxon MS. of the 

 earlier half of the eleventh century, where one gleeman is 

 playing the fiddle while another is throwing up and catch- 

 ing three balls in rotation (Cotton MS , Tiberius, c. vi.). 

 This is the figure with the primitive fiddle : — 



Fig. 5. — Anglo Saxon Fiddle. Xl'h Centur>-. (British Museum.) 



It will be seen that the shape of the body of the in- 

 strument prevents the use of the finger-board for the 

 production of the higher notes, and to obviate this diffi- 

 culty, a hole was subsequently made through the back, so 

 that the performer's hand might have more command over 

 the strings. In this form the Anglo-Saxon or early English 

 name was cruth, Anglice, crowd, a crowder and a fiddler 

 being synonymous. 



" The fiddler's crowd now squeaks aloud," &c. 



Fig. 6.— Crowd. English. About the XllPh Century. 



The third stage of improvement was to diminish the 

 size of the body, to give it indented sides so as to allow 

 free action to the bow, and lengthen the neck, as in the 



