Yet it is by way of Chaldæa and Egypt that our chief interests will be found, where relics of the musical arts had permanence not granted to them elsewhere. Persia and India yield us less as matter for enquiry, since it is the class of stringed instruments of light kind that their peoples have mostly favoured. Some problems are still left in India which we should like to have solved. The transverse flute is constantly found in ancient carvings in the hands of Krishna, who is popularly believed to have been its inventor; but how it came about that the double flutes should be found on the carvings both of wood and stone awakens curiosity. What historical significance had they? Not a survival of any kind is there in the usage of the present time. Only as it were yesterday, at the British Museum, I was looking over the series of very old carvings in wood,—friezes which have formed the risers of the steps to the Tope at Jumal-Garlic in Afghanistan, crowded with figures of men and women and animals in the uncouth style so characteristic of the land that was the home of Buddha. In these scenes, depicting the history of the great Renunciator, I found amongst the groups of players on instruments several instances of players upon these double pipes, the counterpart of those graven in the historical records of Babylon and Nineveh, and painted on vases by Etruscans, and carved in marble by the Greeks. What does it all mean? How have the races of mankind been affiliated? We find the double flutes in India; we do not find them in China. In that intermediate land of Thibet, has the Grand Lama any evidence or record of them? It is curious that the Chinese, although they have the earlier Pan’s pipes, have neither the double pipes nor the lyre—instruments of Greece—yet they have a system of music essentially the same as the Greeks, and (as will be shown you in the _Sheng_) a scale consisting of the two conjunct tetrachords, forming with an added tetrachord an octave and a fourth; the key-note being the fourth of the scale, equal to the _Mese_ of the Greeks. The Chinese style of music though lacking the refined ideal of art is on precisely the same lines, vocal with recitative and instrumental interposed phrases; and if the hymns of the old Confucian temple be transcribed side by side with the fragments we have of the worship of Apollo only exacting criticism could determine the different origin. They are equally capable of being harmonized with effective dignity. Further, I would remark also that the Chinese notation, like the Greek, consists solely of added signs written beside the words of the hymn. All the details seem to point to a time in a far distant past when both races were in contact with one source; then came a day of sudden disruption—one race eastward, one race westward: each pursuing its own way. So the years rolled on, bearing their records on two distinct rolls of separate destiny.