But now listen. “Music in China,” says Van Aalst, “has been known since the remotest antiquity. The first invaders of China certainly brought with them certain notions of music. The aborigines themselves had also some kind of musical system, which their conquerors admired and probably mixed with their own. These invaders were a band of immigrants fighting their way among the aborigines, and supposed to have come from the south of the Caspian Sea; remnants of the original _Li_, the _Kuei_, and the _Feng_ tribes are said to be still in existence in south China.” Is there not here the hint of a curious problem? By what track came the Phœnix and the Pan’s pipes both to Greece and to China? Dim, through sequestered years we should wander back, to some immemorial age, moss grown with primæval traditions, long ere these lands had their names, and in the deep recesses of forests untrodden by the foot of man, peradventure we should find that dwelling place of the great god Pan whence in the earliest of days he came bringing his river reeds and his wild music with him. [Illustration] CHAPTER XIV. The Mongols’ New Home. THE MYTHICAL FINDING OF THE LÜS. In considering questions of early origin and of direction of human intelligence, there is no point of more importance to bear in mind than the allowance of long periods for the operation of the process we are now accustomed to call evolution. When we have traced history to its utmost verge in the dim past, the civilization we come then in contact with, in those very ancient days gives evidence of many centuries—aye, even many tens of centuries—having been necessary for that growth of adaptations recognised as the outcome of human intelligence and industry in such communities. So, when I speak of origin, I am thinking of a time when systems were not; of conditions when devices were more the result of spontaneous impulse than deliberate invention. China, certainly of all existing empires the most ancient, has records which extend almost unbroken back to a period of 2400 B.C., and then beyond that lies the haze of a remote past, where the light of tradition breaks through with no uncertain radiance, revealing points of distance far, far, away, telling of another 2000 years of the still immeasurable past of the “black-haired people” who settled along the banks of the Great Yellow River, and whose descendants in succeeding centuries spread over the valley of the still greater Yang-tse River, and pushing southward appropriated territory after territory, and who to-day outnumber every other nation on the face of the earth. A strange destiny! to increase, yet not to progress. Many little digressions into the history and customs of the Chinese seem inevitable in attempting an enquiry into the origin and nature of the musical instruments and music of this singular people.