for the mistake brought out the secret, and the information long wanted was to be had for the asking, and came out in a very matter of fact way. M. Maspero says that the head piece found with the pipe was a hollow piece of reed, bulb shaped, and that it was a custom to grow such bulbs by subjecting the reed during its early growth to artificial constraint. Places in the reed would be chosen, round which, when it was about half an inch in diameter, a string or other fibre would be wound closely, and the reed so treated left otherwise to grow to its proper growth of about exteriorly three quarters of an inch. The artificial waist therefore remained with, say, a quarter inch interior diameter, whilst the other portion expanded in growth as usual, and thus these mysterious bulbs were formed. The explanation is delightfully simple, and the wonder is that no one thought of it before, for I expect that there are similar practices of reed torture going on in other parts of the world, which probably even our botanists could have made us acquainted with. The difficulties of obtaining knowledge from those who know is, however, a common experience; not that knowledge is refused or withheld, but that the specialist and the neophyte seem unable to get into the same line of sight, and between the two there is often a great lack of perceptivity of the actual kind of help wanted, and the language of reply only perhaps may serve to show us what dumb creatures we are in our endeavours to understand one another. The eleven holed pipe was found in 1888. As M. Maspero has no doubt about the age of this flute, and maintains that it dates back to the eighteenth dynasty, and as he is in the front rank of authority as an Egyptologist, we have to accept his decision, although it throws previous conclusions into confusion. The Chinese are held to have possessed an octave scale of twelve semitones more than four thousand years ago, but heretofore we had no hint of an early existence of such amongst the Egyptians, nor of an intercourse with China which would account for identity. It is altogether mysterious, and raises new questions of affinities, and of the evolution of mind in the human race. So far the details afforded give a new insight into the nature of the bulbed flute, they tend to support my idea of the use of the bulb for holding a concealed reed. As it is, Egypt has revealed one secret concerning the subulone flutes, and shown that the double and triple bulbs depicted on the Etruscan vases are essentials of the structure of the flutes, and can no longer be regarded as conventional ornament. M. Maspero sent Mr. Southgate a tracing of the bulb piece in his possession, who has obliged me with a copy of it. The dark irregular patches are due to accidental adherence of some bitumen. The numerals indicate merely proportions in the interior diameters. [Illustration: _Fig. 23._]