My conclusion, curious as it may seem, is put forth seriously, after much study and after long inquisitive looking into things, possibly worth thinking about. Very lately I found a pertinent yet undesigned confirmation of my views in a work by Dr. A. J. Ellis on the “Musical Scales of Various Nations.” As a result of his extensive investigation, he says “The final conclusion is, that the musical scale is not one, not ‘natural,’ nor even founded necessarily on the laws of the constitution of musical sound, but very diverse, very artificial, very captious.” He has actually, as it were, caught the scale in the act of changing by a caprice at the bidding of the finger. On the lute, in the very early Persian and Arabic scales, the middle finger had nothing to do, and to find employment for the lazy finger, a ligature was, on the neck of the lute, tied half way between two existing notes. One Zalzal, a celebrated lutist, who died eleven centuries ago, tied this ligature half way, and so added two notes to the scale. “These notes,” Dr. Ellis says, “became of great importance in Arab music, and effectually distinguished the older Arabic form from the later Greek.” For the coherence of the views I express upon this question, it is to be implied that pipes and reeds have had an earlier development at the hands of man than strings had, although the latter furnished the first tangible means by which musical ratios were demonstrated by Greek philosophers. In China the first standards of sounds were pipes, and by them the degrees of the scale were fixed historically, yet too complete to have had their real origin elsewhere than in the land of Myth. There also must be placed the origin of the beautiful little “Sheng” to which the Chinese attribute an unknown antiquity. The term flutes, it is necessary to remember, is in ancient usage of literature applied to include all pipes blown across and likewise those sounded by means of reeds that the breath sets vibrating. All the world over men have found delight in fluting, and the flute as an instrument appears to be the common property of the human race. Either of bones of animals or birds, of reeds or alders, of stones or of clay, the art of man has fashioned flutes from the beginning of time’s records. Seeking to trace man’s earliest musical instruments it will become plain to us that life moves very slowly. How little is really new; variation follows variation. See what a long process thought is. It takes a whole race many centuries to think a new thought, and embody it.