I find that mostly the scientific man is as bigoted as the superstitious man when he brings himself to talk of the beautiful fitness of nature’s designs, and of the unerring guidance for our behoof to be found in her operations, and so forth. Now, I know that it is customary to vaunt “nature’s _teaching_ of harmony and _the diatonic scale_,” in the unconscious training she gives us in compounding quality of tone, and furnishing us with a chain of harmonics in a range so nearly out of discrimination of our hearing that, in our average daily life, we are blissfully unaware of the experiences to which we have been subjected. Backed though this doctrine is by the great name of Helmholtz, I confess that I find myself unable to admit its relevance. First and foremost in the consideration of Chinese music is the fact that the Chinese have no care for our harmony: they will have none of it. Neither will they take to our diatonic scale: it offends their sense of art. Unisons and concords of two notes (as fourths and thirds, and their inversions) satisfy their sense of the harmonious. In this, certain other Eastern nations agree with them. The attempt to find an equal temperament scale as we understand it, of twelve semitones, fails as regards the old instruments. The _P’ai-hsiao_ is reported of as possessing a scale of twelve equally tempered semitones; the arrangement being of alternate notes right and left, the deepest notes being at each end, and the shortest pipes in the middle,—a plan adopted in organ building. Not having yet had an instrument of the kind in my hands, I cannot say anything by knowledge; but certainly the scale set out by Van Aalst is not semitonal. For he expressly selects five notes, three being a quarter tone lower and two a quarter tone higher than in a correct scale of the modern type. Even these named had better, I expect, have been named as only approximately a quarter tone wrong; there is no intentional quarter, but a fixed relation to some other notes which by coincidence seem to make agreement, but only more or less near. It is said that the pipes to the right hand are the male or _yang-lüs_, and to the left the _yin-lüs_ or females; each class is in playing kept absolutely to itself, which is anything but chromatic in its system. There are sixteen pipes, all the odd numbers being _yang_, and all the even numbers _yin_. The pipes are arranged upon an ornamental frame; they correspond to the twelve _lüs_ and the first four _lüs_ of the grave series; and in notes said to correspond to those of the bell and stone chimes, the highest being treble _b_. [Illustration: _Fig. 27._ _The Te-ching, or One of the Chime._]