“Music first on earth was found In Gaelic accents deep; When Jubal in his oxter squeezed The blether o’ a sheep,” and that is little enough. That the bagpipe is an instrument of great antiquity is an admitted fact, but whether it is one of those referred to in Scripture is another matter. The pipe without the bag is mentioned in I. Sam. x. 5, Isaiah v. 12, and Jer. xlviii. 36, but the pipe without the bag is not the bagpipe. There have been many attempts made to identify the instrument with one or other of those named in Scripture, and in histories of Scripture times, but these are all based on conjecture. An instrument is mentioned which was composed of two reeds perforated according to rule, and united to a leathern bag, called in Persian _nie amban_; and in Egypt a similar instrument is described as consisting of two flutes, partly of wood and partly of iron. Another traveller tells of an Arabian instrument which consisted of a double chanter with several apertures, and in 1818 ancient engravings were found in the northern states of Africa which seemed to prove that an instrument like the bagpipe had existed in Scripture times. The Chaldeans and Babylonians had two peculiar instruments, the _Sambuka_ and the _Symphonia_, and some historians identify the latter as the _sackbut_, the alleged ancestor of the bagpipe. Others assert that a form of the bagpipe was used in the services of the Temple at Jerusalem, but this in any case, may be treated as the merest of conjecture. The historical references to the instrument as having existed at all in these days are few and far between:— 385 B.C.—Theocritus, a writer who flourished about this date, mentions it incidentally in his pastorals, but not in such a way as to give any indication of what form it assumed. 200 B.C.—An ancient terra cotta excavated at Tarsus by Mr. W. Burchhardt, and supposed to date from 200 B.C., represents a piper with a wind instrument with vertical rows of reed pipes, firmly attached to him. The instrument has also been found sculptured in ancient Nineveh. A.D. 1.—There is a singular tradition in the Roman Catholic Church to the effect that the shepherds who first saw the infant Messiah in the stable expressed their gladness by playing on the bagpipe. This is, of course, possible, but there is only the tradition and the likelihood that the shepherds would have musical instruments of some kind to support the theory. Albrecht Durer, a famous German artist of the 16th century, has perpetuated the idea in a woodcut of the Nativity, in which he represents one of the shepherds playing on the pipes, but his work is, naturally, founded on the tradition. The illuminator of a Dutch missal in the library of King’s College, Aberdeen, has taken liberties with the tradition and given the bagpipe to one of the appearing angels, who uses it for playing a salute. [Illustration: