A very valuable piece of information has recently been obtained from Egypt, and we owe our knowledge of it to Mr. T. L. Southgate who read a paper at a Musical Association meeting, upon the pair of Egyptian flutes found and shown by Mr. Petrie. He had obtained tidings and measurements of similar pipes in foreign museums, and gave particulars of experiments as to pitch, and showed a model made according to details communicated to him by M. Maspero of a so-called flageolet with eleven holes, found in ancient Panopolis anterior to the eighteenth dynasty, 1500 B.C. This extraordinary find he stated, was furnished with a moveable beak of the whistle kind, and it gave a scale of semitones and two enharmonic intervals; and the scale, he maintained, corresponded almost exactly with our present chromatic scale. Thus the musical acquirement of the Egyptians was raised to a most exalted level, much beyond anything ascribed to that people, and some head-shakings and symptoms of unbelief became manifest among the curious musicians assembled. I confess that I was among the doubters. Neither the flageolet nor the scale seemed to me to conform to the genius of the people, as shown in their tablets of stone, or papyrus rolls, or wall paintings. The date 1500 B.C.—four hundred years older than the Lady Maket flutes—was understood to be fixed by M. Maspero, and confirmed by other recognised Egyptologists, and the genuineness of the relic seemed vouched for. And now comes the strange part of the discovery. It was found that the supposed flageolet beak was no flageolet affair at all, neither in form nor purpose, and that what had been interpreted in the drawing as a whistle mouth was the representation merely of a patch of pitch or bitumen that had in ancient days got attached to the original. About as dumbfounding an experience as that which befel the renowned Mr. Pickwick at the deciphering of the ever memorable Roman inscription. We may now sing old Hummel’s chorus:— “Light, light in darkness, The daylight dawns;”