and is tested, for the last refinements, in separate rooms. Since the completion of the last building, they reckon on a yearly output of not less than three thousand five hundred pianos, on which eight hundred workers are employed. The proportion of grands to cottages is as three to four, a proof of the enormous popularity of the cottage, for which as a piece of furniture it is so easy to find room, but which, even in its best specimens, can never give to the musician the fulness of tone and the resonance of a grand. The demand for Bechsteins is greater than their factories can meet. It is remarkable that half of them go to England and the English colonies through the London branches; while Germany, Austria, Russia, Italy, Spain, and South America, share the other half. In a business of such magnitude it is no mere ostentation to record these figures, which simply supply the necessary statistics of the general trade. [Illustration: Upright Hammerclavier (pianoforte), Italian, beginning of 19th century. Two pedals, one to raise the dampers, the other a “jalousie schwellung” (_i.e._ Venetian shutters, like an organ swell or the harmonium “forte” action). Richly inlaid. Engraved crowns on the fronts of the keys. De Wit collection. ] [Illustration: Bechstein Cottage Piano, “English style.”] So long as the piano was merely an instrument for more or less gifted musicians, it was unnecessary to consider the question which to-day, when it has become a general means of social pleasure, stands in the foreground--namely its treatment as a piece of furniture. The “square” instrument has only certain parts, particularly the lower extremities, in which the style of the time could be expressed. The legs and the feet were, in the time of the Ruckers, _baroque_; as in the time of the Streichers they adopted the style of the Empire, and in our day that of the Renaissance. The rest of the body was fixed in its main lines by the given natural forms; and has altered very little in architectural relations in the course of centuries. The piano was in the fortunate position, even in the times when as yet little attention was paid to constructive logic, of being a construction, which, from its very aim, gained the most beautiful form. With its gracefully-bending walls, and its natural and yet characteristic shape, the grand piano, in many furnishing schemes of the insipid fifties or the glaring eighties, in many a jerry-built and cheaply appointed house, stood as the single solid and carefully wrought article in the place. The cottage, on the other hand, which too often is meant to be nothing but a piece of furniture, and which with its encasing wood-walls offers only too much opportunity to fashionable taste, has sunk deep into the domestic style, and even to-day has hardly freed itself from these false influences. It would seem that the cottage piano was invented in 1739 by the priest Don Domenico of Mela in Gagliano.