This is plausible enough, but far from conclusive. It is but the outline of a description, and admits of various modes of filling up. _If_ the instrument partook _at all_ of the violin character, it might seem, from the reference which its name bears to the _knees_, to have been the rude progenitor of either the double-bass or the violoncello, which have both, as is well known, their official post between the knees: but then, the prefix of ἐπί would denote that it was played _upon_ the knees of the artist. “Very well,” says the antiquarian; “it was a fiddle _reversed_.” “Nay, Dr. Dryasdust, if you yourself _overturn_ what you are about, I have no need to say more.” _Au reste_, let any body stretch four strings over a small piece of wood, and play on them with a smooth stick, and then take account of what it comes to. No, no; whatever the _Epigonion_ may have been to the Greeks, he is nothing to _us_: he may have been a respectable individual of the musical genus of _his_ day, when people blew a shell or a reed, and called it music; but we cannot for a moment receive him as the patriarch of the Fiddle Family. As soon should we think of setting up Pherekydes against Paganini. Dismissing the Epigonion, we come to the _Semicon_, another pretender of Greek origin. This also, we are farther told, was a _kind of violin_: but we deny that he was father to the _violin kind_. The Semicon is said to have been played on with a bow; and yet a learned German (Koch), in the fulness of his determination to have _strings_ enough to his bow, has claimed no less than thirty-five, as the complement of the Semicon. How could any bow pay its devoirs distinctly to thirty-five strings? Here, then, the dilemma is this: either to translate the thing in question into a _bow_ is to _traduce_ the term, or else the _strings_ are an impertinence. _Utrum horum mavis, accipe._ If the word _plectrum_ could, by any ingenuity, be established to mean _a bow_, quotations enough might be accumulated to prove that instruments played with bows had their origin in a very remote period. But the translation of the word into _a bow, or such like thing_, as we find it in the Dictionaries, arises simply from the want of a known equivalent—a deficiency which makes it necessary to adopt any term that offers even the shadow of a synonym. It has been stated, on the authority of a passage from Euphorion’s book on the Isthmian Games, that there was an ancient instrument called _magadis_, which was surrounded by strings; that it was placed upon a pivot, upon which it turned, whilst the performer touched it with _the bow_ (or, at least, the _plectrum_); and that this instrument afterwards received the name of _sambuce_. The hieroglyphics of Peter Valerian, page 628, chap. 4, present the figure of a muse, holding, in her right hand, a kind of bass or contra-violin, the form of which is not _very_ unlike that of our violins or basses.