The successors of the original schalmei are described in detail by Praetorius, who wrote in the first decade of the seventeenth century. Of the six varieties of pommer mentioned by him, the treble pommer became transformed into the hautbois (high wood); the alto pommer into the cor Anglais (cor anglé, bent horn),--known during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the oboe da caccia; and out of the bass pommer, likewise styled bombarde, emanated the fagotto (bundle of fagots). As a commentary to the above enumeration one should take note of a quite remarkable tendency which was, indeed, already in vogue during the Hellenic age. Namely, that from each parent instrument whether string, wood, or brass, there germinated a complete family representing the four ranges of the human voice. And again from these the process of tribal expansion was carried yet further. Moreover it must be remembered that before the Middle Ages, the art of combining human voices in polyphony was but in a nascent state, and probably existed in classic Greece not at all. Therefore families of instrumental species cannot have been constructed for the purpose of obtaining homogeneous _harmonic_ effects. An extensive _range_ of con-natural tone-color was then the objective. It will be found that this tendency was uniform throughout the history of instrumental evolution. Of course when we reach the sixteenth century, we find that the advantage of distributing the components of harmony among the members of assimilated instruments began to be appreciated. It is possibly due to this natural evolution that innovators in orchestration at first accustomed themselves to the use of pure tone-color rather than of mixed tints. Thus in the sixteenth century, the flûte à bec, predecessor of the modern flute, was employed in groups of four. Praetorius makes mention of no less than eight different kinds as prevalent in his day. Our chief representative of the single reed, the clarinet, which was not invented until the end of the seventeenth century, owes its origin to a primitive form of instrument with clarinet mouthpiece:--the mediæval chalemiax or chalumeau, whence the phonetic rendition, schalmei. The now obsolete basset-horn belongs properly to this genealogy. It was frequently used during the time of its development by the composers of the latter eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. From it were devolved the short-lived alto and tenor clarinets, and the better qualities of all three are now embodied in the subsequently perfected bass-clarinet. Mention is also due to the saxophone, invented by Sax in 1840. It should be classed under the heading of wood instruments rather than of brass, since its tone-quality partakes somewhat of the nature of the clarinet. It has a single-reed mouthpiece, and the fingering is akin to that of the clarinet; but the over-blowing produces the octave as in the flute and oboe, whereas in the clarinet the twelfth is produced. Sax made