Some tribes in remote places in the east still have a rude prototype of the instrument, consisting of a hollow lump of clay with four or five pipes irregularly stuck in, and beyond that they have not proceeded; and such may have been the stage at which our ideal man with an order loving brain set about thinking. Now, truth to tell, I imagined myself to be this Chinaman, and wondered how, in such a position as his, and with only his means and his purposes, I should evolve such an instrument. Curiously enough, as it turned out, I hit upon the right idea, or as near proof of rightness as imagination need come to. Until I had worked out the scheme on this primitive basis, the instrument had been a puzzle to me, and it did not seem to me that any writer rightly understood it; and even the descriptions by musical experts were obviously erroneous when examined without prepossessions of the scholastic kind. The first instrument that came into my hands was perfect in structure, but incomplete in reeds, not more than four or five metal tongues remaining. The pitch of these I ascertained, and the relations happened to be useful for comparative deductions. It had long been a creed with me that disease and death are our best teachers; they cause us to question natural mechanism, injury and disorder, and make us desire to know relation and purpose in artificial mechanism also. Thus my poor _Sheng_ incited me to wish to know its structural meaning, to ask how it came to be what it is. Music was a pastime ages before it became an art. Religion is earlier than priesthood. I go therefore to the man who first made this form of instrument; question why he made it, how he took his first step, how he came to take his second, how he by process of thinking formed an instrument for himself and for others to play. His ancestors, I consider, came from the south, and in the early period would have used reeds with tongues cut in them after the fashion of the _Arghool_; but this man is an artificer, has more civilised ways in communities of industry, and is influenced by the beginnings of commerce. China is rich in mines of iron and copper and zinc, and her people were a deft fingered race, expert in delicate working of metals, and, at this stage of advance in simple arts the tongues of reed would be superseded by tongues of metal, thin and elastic, and free from the disadvantages of swelling by moisture and of the need of frequent renewals. Hence, in cutting such substitutes by the minute chisels they are so clever in using, the tongue or reed would naturally, and without design, turn out to be a _free reed_. A discovery having far reaching consequences, albeit long limited to the land of this peculiar people, due to the special deftness they have in the fine working of copper; for these reed plates are of little more than paper thickness. Just three cuts of a thin chisel, and the tongue is formed in the little brass plate; and