THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 73 



FLUTES OF THE TIME OF MOSES, RECENTLY 

 DISCOVERED IN EGYPT. 



Read before the Ha/iiilton Association, March 12th, i8gi. 

 BY J. E. P. ALDOUS, B. A. 



The importance from an historical point of view of the recent 

 discoveries in Egypt must be my excuse for bringing this musical 

 topic before an audience that is not composed entirely of musicians. 

 Within the last few months discoveries have been made that carry 

 back our authentic information one thousand years earlier than it 

 went at the beginning of last year, and I think I can make this clear 

 to any one who has the reasoning faculty, musical or otherwise. 



Let me commence with a short and very condensed statement 

 of some scientific musical facts, which it is necessary to understand 

 in order to appreciate the value of the discoveries. 



Tone, or musical sound, is the effect on the brain of pulsations 

 of the air at regular intervals striking the drum of the ear. The pul- 

 sations of the air are started in various ways. If a stretched string 

 is plucked it will give a certain note ; if it is stopped or held at the 

 half of its length each half will give vibrations twice as quick, or in 

 other words will sound an octave higher. You can easily under- 

 stand that between the end of the string and the halfway point there 

 are an infinity of points where you could " stop " it, each stop 

 making the pitch a shade higher till the octave is reached. 



These " stops " (or steps we might call them) are of the utmost 

 importance, for music is dependent on the number of steps in the 

 octave. Modern music, by which I mean music as we find it in 

 Europe, America and all parts of the world, colonized from these 

 sources (the only music worth calling music), is built on a system of 

 steps of such size that there are twelve of them in each octave. 

 These twelve are called half-steps, or semitones, which latter term 

 would imply another arrangement of the steps that I must allude to. 

 If you sound these twelve half-steps in the octave, one after another, 

 you get no idea whatever of tonality, which means a relationship of 



