The question has also an acoustic bearing; according to Weber’s law, the free reed is amenable to variations of pitch: by its nature it is able to accommodate itself, and may be taken down an octave in pitch under the influence of the tube with which it is associated; but upon that descent of pitch being reached, it starts back again to its own pitch. Joining such a reed to the flute, I find that its pitch is lowered as each hole is in succession closed, but that at the last hole it refuses to speak at all. This shows that a different reed should be selected that would be flexible enough to accommodate itself to altered conditions of tube; but to obtain the right reed will demand a course of arduous experiment upon new ground, the best teacher being experience. I said that the reed refuses to speak. Here comes a noticeable fact: by extreme high pressure I can induce it to speak, and that powerfully. Have we not in this fact some hint—or, may be, explanation—of that strange demand of the Greeks, as it seems to us, for a bandage, a _phorbeion_, like a halter over the head, to prevent the bursting of the cheeks of the player? This intensely produced note may be the kind of note they wanted,—that which they prized and acclaimed in Midas. The probability is that the whole series of notes was produced on this high pressure system, in open air, and intended to be heard by a vast concourse of people. When I played softly or with average strength of breath, I found that I could not take the reed beyond a fourth. Does not this appear to account for the limitation to four holes which so long prevailed? In our own course of evolution of instruments from early times progress has been slow; many centuries passed before the first little brass key was invented and applied to flutes. With the clarionet it was the same: the sudden burst into new life being due to one man,—Denner. From the first to the last period in the development of Greek flutes there were no doubt well marked transition stages of which we possess no record: new inventions equally momentous to them as to us, and upon which new players started into pre-eminence. Midas was credited with the invention of the particular flute upon which he won renown; and it may have been that Pindar intentionally specified it, and that it may have consisted in the application of a free reed of slender brass to obtain a greater range of notes. The free reed in the way that I have suggested was equally applicable to the double and to the single flute; and therefore, whatever the kind of flute upon which glorious Midas played, and won his laurel wreaths and his immortal renown, the special epithet of Pindar would hold true:— Through slender brass it flows.