The parts Orpheus and Apollo have been made to play in infantile Fiddle history have necessarily been dependent upon the licence and the imagination of the sculptor and the medallist. Inferences of antiquity, however, have been drawn from such representations. Tracings of a bow among the sculpture of the ancients have been sought for in vain: no piece is known upon which a bow is distinguishable. A century since, an important discovery was thought to have been made by musical antiquarians in the Grand Duke's Tribuna at Florence, wherein was a small figure of Apollo playing on a kind of Violin with something of the nature of a bow. Inquiry, however, made it clear that the figure belonged to modern art. Orpheus has been represented holding a Violin in one hand and a bow in the other; inquiry again showed that the Violin and the bow were added by the restorer of the statue. The views held by musical historians regarding the origin of the Violin may be described by the terms Asiatic and Scandinavian. The Eastern view, it need scarcely be said, is the most prolonged, exceeding some five thousand years along the vista of time, where little else is discoverable but what is visionary, mythical, and unsubstantial. It is related--traditionally of course--that some three thousand years before our era there lived a King of Ceylon named Ravanon,[2] who invented a four-stringed instrument played with a bow, and which was named after the inventor "the Ravanastron." If it were possible to identify the instrument of that name, now known to the Hindoos, as identical with that of King Ravanon--as M. Sonnerat declares it to be--the Eastern view of our subject would be singularly clear and defined. A declaration, however, resting on tradition, necessarily makes the gathering of evidence in support of it a task both dubious and difficult.[3] [Footnote 2: M. Sonnerat, "Voyage aux Indes Orientales," 1806.] [Footnote 3: In Mr. Engel's "Researches into the Early History of the Violin Family," 1883--a book containing much valuable evidence on the subject--the author rightly remarks: "Now, this may be true; still it is likewise true that most of the Asiatic nations are gifted with a remarkably powerful imagination, which evidently induces them sometimes to assign a fabulously high age to any antiquity of theirs the origin of which dates back to a period where history merges in myth. At the present day the Hindoos possess, among their numerous rude instruments of the Fiddle class, an extraordinarily primitive contrivance, which they believe to be the instrument invented by Ravanon. Their opinion has actually been adopted by some of our modern musical historians as if it were a well established truth."]