These considerations help us to understand how it is that in their music they have shewn so little growth. They drew from the same musical roots as other nations yet remain stunted; socially and intellectually the Chinaman of to-day is the same as the man who was obedient to the rule of Yao, and Hwang-ti, and when the latter formulated the rules that were held to govern the music, the Chinese were content that for ever after music was fixed; they appear to delight in keeping things in a dwarfed state as they take a pride in dwarfed trees, and we of the Western world find it so difficult to understand them, but we still go on trying. In these hints I think you will find fair justification for my belief in the very remote antiquity of a musical scale, a set sequence of sounds by choice adopted, it may be of four or five sounds, common in its rudimentary stage amongst all the tribes aggregated in Southern Asia, where we have for many scientific reasons a conviction that civilization originated. The great migrations of peoples were caused by famines, plagues, inundations, overcrowding of population, but apart from these the instinctive desire of man to better himself in place and position and possessions was an ever inciting force. An old Akkadian hymn, perhaps the oldest piece of writing in the world, commences, “Mankind is born to wander,” a simple sentence—a premonition of all history. Imagine, if you can, the ages of civilized life necessary to bring the human brain to a conception so philosophic and true as this. Earth is old now. Earth was very old then. The Chinese affirm that the Emperor Hwang Ti, the Yellow Emperor, invented the scale of twelve semitones, called the twelve _lüs_, and according to the record of date this was 4590 years ago. The pitch of the notes of all ancient systems was described by lineal measurements; hence every interval accepted was either the excess or defect resulting from the division of a greater measure, the octave, or the fourth. In some way or other the derived proportions have been grateful to human ears, perhaps because they denote absence of conflict, or presence of symmetry. The discovery by the Yellow Emperor as narrated reads somewhat fabulous. It is stated that he sent his minister Ling Lun to the valley west of the Kuênlun mountains, where bamboos of regular thickness grow; that Ling Lun cut the piece of bamboo which is between the knots, and the sound emitted by this tube when blown across he considered the bass or tonic; that is our way of naming, not his. The length was equal to one Chinese foot. He then cut a second pipe two thirds of the length of the first, which gave a sound a fifth higher, and continued similar relations from pipe to pipe, and so on, he completed the series of twelve sounds according to the idea of his master, and for evermore fixed the musical scale handed down from generation to generation through thousands of years.