Female players also used the phorbia in playing. Dennis notes on a vase “an _auletris_ with black hair, and a _phorbia_ over the mouth, stood by the bier playing the double pipes”—thus keeping up the Egyptian custom. The reeds are not now taken into the mouth. Drawings of the _Arghool_ should have shown that each reed was, at the tip, tied to the pipe by a slack rambling string, for by these bits of string each reed is connected with its pipe lest it should be lost. This is shown in the Summarah drawing. Enthusiasts newly trying the _Arghool_ are very ready to drop it, since they soon feel sick from the unpleasant sensation of the reeds and the loose bits of string in the mouth, and it is an experience one remembers. Come with me to the Vase Rooms of the British Museum and look at some of the spoils of Time. Mr. Dennis in his beautiful work on the Vases of Etruria says “the enormous quantities of the vases that have been found in Etruscan soil, within the last fifty years alone, may be reckoned not by thousands but by myriads.” In these rooms—and there are three large rooms devoted to these specimens of fictile art—there are some hundreds of vases. Many hours I have spent amongst them, brooding over their beauty, and wondering of the tales they told of a people long passed away and a religion once the glory of the earth. On numbers of vases flute players male and female, are depicted, sometimes three or four on one vase; and the various attitudes I observed, and the indications of purpose they betokened, led me believe that there was some meaning beyond mere ornamentation in the cocoon like bulbs of the flute heads. I examined minutely vase after vase, and discovered at length out of the whole number three vases on which were delineated players handling their flutes each in a different manner, and these conveyed clearly to my mind the conviction that the bulbs were detached pieces which the player was able to arrange. Then arose the question in my mind, “for what purpose?” You have the three pictures before you. Now it is very curious that only by means of the Greco-Etruscan art work are the _subulo_ double flutes brought to our knowledge (for distinction, it may be well to give these bulbed flutes the name by which the Etruscan player was called); and yet the period during which this new invention was in vogue, comprises that in which Greece was at the height of her intellectual power. The age of Pericles and Phidias, of Plato and Euripides, of the rearing of the Parthenon and of the grand Temple of Jove at Olympia!