180 THE APPLICATIONS OF PHYSICAL FORCES. [BOOK n. 



The musette (Fig. 13'2) is an improved bagpipe, with the pipes 

 c, D, furnished with keys like the instruments we have already 

 noticed; the flute, hautboy, &c., and the bourdon E is a cylinder 

 containing a series of pipes to which reeds are adapted inside. Some 

 of these pipes are. curved doubly, which gives deeper notes as their 

 length is thereby increased. Slides which project outside, are 

 movable along the length of the bourdon, and enable a slit which 

 corresponds to the aperture of each pipe to be more or less closed. 

 Another essential difference between this instrument and the bagpipe 

 is, that the musician fills the instrument by the wind-tube B, not by 



FIG. 133. Bellows used to fill the musette. 



blowing with the mouth but by working a bellows (Fig. 133) fixed to 

 the opening of the wind-tube, and which the performer carries on his 

 right hip. 



The musette was the fashion in the 17th century, as much 

 at the court and in towns as in the country ; but, in spite of the 

 originality and elegance of its form, and the profusion of ornaments 

 with which it was decorated, it was already abandoned at the end of 

 the reign of Louis the Fourteenth, by which time the taste for music 

 was developed and improved. To day the musette is but a memory. 



