Every nation has always had, as it now has, its own peculiar and distinctive style of expressing emotion through the agency of the voice. Barbarous as the first developments of musical ability may have been, they nevertheless expressed the peculiar and characteristic feeling of the people who employed them. With one nation the style was melancholy, with another pensive, with another light, and with a fourth lively. Some delighted to denote their ideas in the junction of lengthened and monotonous sounds, expressive of grief; others in short changing accents; of carelessness or indifference; and others in the deep measured sounds of martial melody. These distinctions still exist in so marked a degree among different people as to entitle them to the appellation of national musical characteristics. It is generally believed, and not without good grounds, that the earlier attempts at producing musical effect by the union of a considerable number of voices and instruments, were not remarkable for any of that variety which invests with so many attractions the music of a later period. All the singers enunciated the same notes, and in the same time—very much in the style which large prayer-meetings adopt in the open air. The manner in which the beauty and diversity of concords and discords were first discovered, and the precise era at which such discovery was made, are also matters which are reserved for some later and more successful laborer. This branch of the science of music has, perhaps, undergone greater alteration and improvement than any other. It is by no means an uninteresting study, first to imagine the absence of all knowledge of chords among the first inhabitants of our globe; then to look over the works of the earliest masters whose compositions are still extant, and then to follow the publications of later writers down to the present day, observing at each stage the wonderful differences which exist in the instrumental writings of every age. The act of committing sounds to paper, although very old, must still be regarded, comparatively with the birth of music, as of late discovery. Transferring mere sound from the mind to the paper, without the assistance of any intermediate articulation is a wonder equally great, to say the least of it, as is the act of writing words. Yet no one gives a thought to the invention of the marvel. The fame of Cadmus is diffused over the habitable globe, while the mastermind which first conceived the possibility of recording his thoughts on and in a few parallel lines by means of dots and scratches, causes no inquiry and excites no admiration.