The story of the piano, that queen of musical instruments, involves the whole history of the art of music. Its evolution from the ancient harp, gleaned by man from the wind, “that grand old harper, who smote his thunder harp of pines,” is too long a story to here recite in detail. It must suffice to say, it started with the harp, in its simplest form, composed of a frame with animal tendons stretched tight thereon and twanged by the fingers. Then followed strings of varied length, size, and tension, to obtain different tones, soon accompanied by an instrument called the plectrum--a bone or ivory stick with which to vibrate the strings, to save the fingers. This was the harp of the Egyptians, and of Jubal, “the father of all such as handle the harp and the organ,” and half-brother of Tubal Cain, the great teacher “of every artificer in brass and iron.” Then the harp was laid prostrate, its strings stretched over a sounding board, and each held and adapted to be tightened by pegs, and played upon by little hammers having soft pellets or corks at their ends. This was the psaltery and the dulcimer of the Assyrians and the Hebrews. The Greeks derived their musical instruments from the Egyptians, and the Romans borrowed theirs from the Greeks, but neither the Greeks nor the Romans invented any. Then, after fourteen or fifteen centuries, we find the harp, both in a horizontal and an upright position, with its strings played upon by keys. This was the _clavicitherium_. In the sixteenth century came the virginal, and the spinet, those soft, tinkling instruments favoured by Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary, and which, recently brought from obscurity, have been made to revive the ancient Elizabethan melodies, to the delight of modern hearers. These were followed in the seventeenth century by the clavichord, the favourite instrument of Bach. Then appeared the harpsichord, a still nearer approach to the piano, having a hand or knee-worked pedal, and on which Mozart and Handel and Haydn brought out their grand productions. The ancient Italian cembello was another spinet. Thus, through the centuries these instruments had slowly grown. By 1711 in Italy, under the inventive genius of Bartolommeo Cristofori of Florence, they had culminated in the modern piano. The piano as devised by him differed from the instruments preceding it chiefly in this, that in the latter the strings were vibrated by striking and pulling on them by pieces of quills attached to levers and operated by keys, whereas, in the piano there were applied hammers in place of quills. In the 1876 exhibition at Philadelphia, a piano was displayed which had been made by Johannes Christian Schreiber of Germany in 1741.