This is the encyclopædia definition, and generally speaking it is correct. But the bag is certainly an addition to the simple reed or shepherd’s pipe. And if we wish to go further back we can go to the time when a schoolboy on his way to school pulled a green straw from the cornfield, and biting off a bit, trimmed the end and made for himself a pipe. “Many a pipe,” says J. F. Campbell, “did boys make of straws in the days of my youth, and much discord did we produce in trying to play on the slender oaten pipe in emulation of John Piper.” Boys being still boys, they still pull the green straws in the passing by, and no doubt if the pipes were not already in existence they would again grow out of this primitive pipe, slowly but surely. Without the bag the pipe is the most ancient of all instruments. It was quite natural that people should try to form sounds by blowing through a tube, and afterwards to vary the sounds either by varying the size or shape of the tube or by fitting into it some special mechanism. The pipe was well known to the Trojans, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, who had different kinds for different measures, and from contemporary writings we learn that the strain of blowing these early pipes was so great that the player had to bandage his lips and cheeks with a leathern muzzle. One ancient picture represents a player blowing a triple pipe, that is, three pipes joined at the mouth-piece, but separate further down, a performance which must have made the need for some improved method of supplying wind very obvious. The name of the genius who first thought of having a reserve supply in a bag attached to the pipes, which would keep an equable current for the purposes of the music, while at the same time it would relieve the player’s mouth of the continued strain of blowing, is lost to posterity, but in all probability the idea was originated at different places and at different times by different people. Mac Lean, in his _History of the Celtic Language_, considers the bagpipe as originally consisting of a bladder with drones and chanter of reeds and bulrushes, and affirms that he himself made and played on such an instrument. The first real bagpipe would, however, be a skin, most likely that of a goat or kid, and the invention of the valve in the mouth-piece would follow as a matter of course—that is, if the man who thought of the bag did not also think of having a bellows. There were, no drones in the early pipes. St. Jerome, who lived in the fifth century, says that at the synagogue, in ancient times there was a simple species of bagpipe, consisting of a skin or leather bag, with two pipes, through one of which the bag was inflated, the other emitting the sound. This was the first real bagpipe and it was also, it may be added, the germ of the organ, for the bagpipe is but the organ reduced to its simplest expression. [Illustration: OLD GERMAN WIND INSTRUMENTS—A.D. 1619.