No master of this period seems to have intentionally abandoned the traditional method. Their first purpose in adopting the new scientific idea was to elucidate and fortify the old method. Every successful master undoubtedly taught many pupils who in their turn became teachers. There must have been, in each succession of master and pupil, one teacher who failed to transmit the old method in its entirety. Both master and pupil must have been unconscious of this. No master can be believed to have deliberately withheld any of his knowledge from his pupils. Neither can any student have been aware that he failed to receive his master's complete method. Let us consider a typical instance of master and pupil in the later transition period. Instruction in this case was probably of a dual character. Both teacher and pupil devoted most of their attention to the mechanical features of tone-production. Yet the master continued to listen closely to the student's voice, just as he had done before adopting the (supposedly) scientific idea of instruction. Unconsciously he led the pupil to listen and imitate. When the student found it difficult to apply the mechanical instruction the master would say, "Listen to me and do as I do." Naturally this would bring the desired result. Yet both master and pupil would attribute the result to the application of the mechanical rule. The student's voice would be successfully trained, but he would carry away an erroneous idea of the means by which this was accomplished. Becoming a teacher in his turn, the vocalist taught in this fashion would entirely overlook the unobtrusive element of imitation and would devote himself to mechanical instruction. He would, for example, construe the precept, "Sing with open throat," as a rule to be directly applied; that he had acquired the open throat by imitating his master's tones this teacher would be utterly unaware. More than one generation of master and pupil was probably concerned, in each succession, in the gradual loss of the substance of the old method. The possibility of learning to sing by imitation was only gradually lost to sight. This is well expressed by Paolo Guetta. "The aphorism 'listen and imitate,' which was the device of the ancient school, coming down by way of tradition, underwent the fate of all sane precepts passed along from generation to generation. Through elimination and individual adaptation, through assuming the personal imprint, it degenerated into a purely empirical formula." (_Il Canto nel suo Mecanismo_, Milan, 1902.)