The Romans carried back to their own country, as the results of conquest, specimens of most of the musical instruments they found in use in the countries subdued by them. Thus Greece supplied Rome with nearly all the soft instruments of the class of lyres and flutes. Germany and the northern provinces, being inhabited by warlike races, gave to their conquerors the taste for loud-sounding instruments, such as trumpets and drums. Asia, and Judæa especially, which had multiplied various kinds of metal-instruments for use in their religious ceremonies, were the means of naturalising in Roman music deep-toned instruments of the class of bells and tom-toms (a kind of drum). Egypt introduced into Italy the timbrel along with the worship of Isis. Byzantium had no sooner invented the first pneumatic organs than the new religion of Christ took possession of them for exclusive consecration to its service, both in the East and in the West. All the musical instruments of the known world had therefore taken refuge, as it were, in the capital of the Roman empire; but their fate was only to disappear and sink into oblivion after they had played their part in the last pomps of that falling empire, and in the final festivals of the ancient mythology. In a letter in which he specially treats of “various kinds of musical instruments,” St. Jerome, who lived from 331 to 420, speaks of those which were in use in his time for the requirements of religion, war, ceremonial, and art. He mentions, in the first place, the organ, and describes it as composed of fifteen brazen pipes, two air-reservoirs of elephant’s skin, and twelve large sets of bellows, “to imitate the voice of thunder.” He next specifies, under the generic name of _tuba_, several kinds of trumpets: that which called the people together, that which directed the march of troops, that which proclaimed the victory, that which sounded the charge against the enemy, that which announced the closing of the gates, &c. One of these trumpets, the shape of which is rather difficult to gather from his description, had three brazen bells, and _roared through four air-conduits_. Another instrument, the _bombulum_, which must have made a frightful uproar, was, as far as we can conjecture from the text of the pious writer, a kind of peal of bells attached to a hollow metallic column which, by the assistance of twelve pipes, reverberated the sounds of twenty-four bells that were set in motion by one another. Next come the _cithara_ of the Hebrews, in the shape of a triangle, furnished with twenty-four strings; the sackbut, of Chaldæan origin, a trumpet formed of several movable tubes of wood, fitting one into the other; the psaltery, a small harp provided with ten strings; and lastly, the _tympanum_, also called the _chorus_, a hand-drum to which were fixed two metal flute-tubes.