The late Carl Engel, _Music of the Most Ancient Nations_ (London, 1864), has formed a kind of Development theory for musical instruments, giving the earliest place to the drum, and the latest to the stringed instruments; those of the latter with key-boards having been invented almost in our own time. This theory has lately been reconstructed upon a more scientific basis by Mr. Rowbotham (_History of Music_, vol. i., London, 1885). The drum and tambourine, and other clashing and mere time-marking instruments, as sistrums, cymbals, castagnettes, and triangles, are on the limit of musical sound and noise, inclining, for the most part, to the latter. The drum is widely used in religious services in different parts of the world, and to play the sistrum was in ancient Egypt the prerogative of a high order of priesthood. The various Buddhist gongs resemble the kettledrums in this respect, that they have a more definable musical element in them, and we find these sonorous metal instruments widely used in China and the Indo-Chinese countries, in Java, and the Indian Archipelago. The Indian drums (Plate XLI.), according to the theory just mentioned, should be aboriginal, but the most ancient, the M'ridang, is attributed to the god S'iva, and is therefore Aryan. Her Majesty the Queen's State Kettledrum (Plate XXXV.) here adorned with a richly embroidered silk banneret, serves to show the highest point the drum has yet attained in estimation and use. On a much higher level is that arrangement of wooden or metal bars in those instruments classed generally as Harmonicons, which are especially at home in Java, Siam, and Burma, and are known to be used from the Hill country of India in the one direction, to Africa in the other. The beautiful Siamese Ranat and Khong (Plate XLIII.) and the Zulu Marimba (Plate XLVIII.) are examples of this wide distribution, and in the latter the gourd resonators attached to the bars show the simplest form of sound reinforcers, which, perfected in various Eastern instruments, such as the Indian Vínas and Sitárs (Plate XL.) has in Europe attained its crowning artistic development in the beautiful pear-shaped Resonance bodies of the Lute and Mandoline. We find also varieties of this beautiful form in the Georgian and Turcoman tambouras, the Colascione of Southern Italy and similar instruments, the migrations of which may here and there be traced along the lines of religious movements, as in Central Asia and Hindostan, in China, the Corea, and Japan. For instance, the shorter-necked lutes and guitars, the rebec, rebab, and other precursors of the viols and violins, which, borrowed from the Arabic population of the Holy Land, actually came to Europe upon the reflex wave of the Crusades. The Saracenic occupation of Spain had, however, its share in the transmission of these instruments, and of a taste for the _pizzicato_, and also of an elaboration of vocal and instrumental