decorate their instruments at little cost, as may be seen in the Ruckers Virginal, Plate XVIII. They painted their sound-boards with appropriate ornamentation, and used bright colour to heighten the effect of their instruments when open. The Italians went even farther in richer details, and beautified other stringed instruments besides those with key-boards. The persistence of noble traditions is shown in the exquisite ornament of the Siamese instruments (Plates XLII. and XLIII.) and of the Japanese Koto (Plate XLVI.). It would be grievous if this Eastern inheritance were lost through the engrafting of Western ideas and reception of our material civilisation. The incentive to all such work is the pleasure found in it, and without pleasure in work the life of the worker is aimless and sad. In describing musical instruments we can refer to no beginnings; those that may be discerned dimly in the glimmering of the historic dawn present a certain completeness that marks an intellectual advance already accomplished. The well-known Egyptian Nefer, a spade-like guitar, or rather tamboura, invited by its long neck the stopping of various notes upon its strings. As early as the Third Dynasty, it had already been so long in use as to have become incorporated in the pictorial language of the Hieroglyphics, in which its representation presented the concept or symbol of the attribute _good_. This stringed instrument, thus complex in its playing, must have been already grey with age when it was cut in stone in the monument of the beautiful Princess Nefer-t, now in the museum at Bulaq. We cannot conjecture when it was discovered that more tones than one could be got from a single string by taking advantage of the expedient of a long neck or finger-board, or from a single pipe by boring lateral holes in it, and closing those holes to produce different notes with the fingers. Even these remote inventions, certainly prehistoric, seem to require that there should be yet older inventions--those which placed pipes or strings of different lengths, or strings of the same length but of different thicknesses and tension, side by side, as in the syrinx or Pan's pipes, or the harp and lyre.