Those who, seeing the holes that are cut upon a common flute, or oboe, consider that in the origin of the instrument they were so done in order fitly to comport with a musical scale, are wrong in their supposition. In the primitive making of a flute the holes were cut to suit the spread of the fingers, and the scales which followed as the result of the placing the holes, were accepted by primitive man; the ear got to like the sequence of sounds, and it so worked into the brain of the race, that ages after, it became an intellectually accepted musical scale, or relation of notes and was varied by evolution; the structure of the organ of hearing is the same in every race, so far as we can ascertain, and the same natural laws are obeyed in its exercise. Different races, however, have developed the hearing ear differently as to its choice, because primitively, in the setting out of their instruments there were differences of relation. The lengths of the strings, and the distances of the holes spaced for the _convenience of the fingers_, ordained the musical scales. Contrast the music of the European and the Asiatic races. Our so-called divine music is to the Chinese miserable, unscientific stuff; and the sounds which please Asiatics as entrancing music, are to us distracting din, positively painful to listen to. The liking of the ear in music is a liking by inheritance, transmitted as a facial type is. The fingers are the fates of the musical art. Curiously enough, six fingers have been the chief arbiters of the nature of man’s music; and yet how long it was before that number was brought into use. Earliest pipe instruments seem to have employed only two fingers; then the thumb was made available, after that the third finger, and at last the little finger was brought into service; it was, however, the period of the ruling of the six fingers, three of each hand, in which the scales were laid, and the art of music developed. In the stringed instruments there is evidence of similar advance from one string to many. Men learnt slowly the marvellous capacities of the lissome fingers they possess. We should see a meaning and a purpose in each change and variation in the shape and adaptation of instruments. It may strike you somewhat strangely that you should be set thinking of bits of wood, and pipes and strings, as being aforetime the actual music makers, moulding in fixed forms our musical tendencies. You fancy they are our servants, unaware that they have ruled us earlier than we have ruled them.