The shawm of the English Bible is the schalmey, the treble instrument of the old Pommer or Bombardo family and the origin of the modern oboe. The oboe da caccia, derived from the alto pommer or Bombardo piccolo of the sixteenth century, has gone out of use, the Italian corno inglese (French cor anglais) having taken its place. There being some confusion about the description by different writers of the oboe da caccia and oboe d'amore, I fall back upon Dr. W.H. Stone's authoritative definition that the oboe da caccia is a bassoon raised a fourth in pitch, while the oboe d'amore is an oboe lowered a fifth. The bassoon, the centre figure in the Plate, has been regarded as a development of the bass pommer or Bombardone, and the transformation has been generally attributed to a canon of Ferrara named Afranio, a native of Pavia. This question has now been definitively settled by Count L.F. Valdrighi, the librarian of the Biblioteca Estense at Modena. He has proved (_Musurgiana_, No. 5, "Il Phagotus d'Afranio"), that Afranio's invention, _ante_ 1539, was of the nature of a corna musa (cornemuse or bagpipe), the bag being most likely combined with soft bass melody pipes, called from their quality of tone "Dolcisuoni," whence the dolcino bass of church organs. This invention was improved by Giambattista Ravilio, also of Ferrara, and thirty years later was perfected by Sigismund Scheltzer of Nuremberg, who, rejecting the cornemuse bag, united the two tubes into the "fagotto," so named from the fascine of beech (fagus), or fagots. The fagotto is the same as our bassoon. This clearing up of a disputed invention has been discovered in a very unlikely place--in an Introduction to the Chaldee language, published in 1539, written by the nephew of Afranio, Teseo-Ambrogio Albonesio, Professor of Chaldee and Syriac at the University of Bologna.