15 16 17 18 19 20 I the owner will wear this gathered branch 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 Wear it yet fear, the flower seen, men will envy.] I have thought it not amiss to subjoin a few other airs of the popular kind, which were written by the same gentleman at Canton, who made the drawings of their musical instruments. CHINESE POPULAR AIRS. [Music: No. I.] [Music: No. II.] [Music: No. III.] [Music: No. IV.] [Music: No. V.] [Music: No. VI.] [Music: No. VII.] [Music: No. VIII.] [Music: No. IX.] They have no other notion of noting down music than that of employing a character expressing the name of every note in the scale; and even this imperfect way they learned from Pereira the Jesuit. They affected to dislike the Embassador's band which they pretended to say produced no music, but a confusion of noises; yet the Emperor's chief musician gave himself a great deal of trouble in tracing out the several instruments on large sheets of paper, each of its particular size, marking the places of the holes, screws, strings, and other parts, which they conceived necessary to enable them to make others of a similar construction. It would be difficult to assign the motive that induced Father Amiot to observe, that "the Chinese, in order to obtain their scale of notes or gamut perfect, were not afraid of submitting to the most laborious operations of geometry, and to the most tedious and disgusting calculations in the science of numbers;" as he must have known, that they were altogether ignorant of geometry, and that their arithmetic extended not beyond their _Swan-pan_. Of the same nature is the bold and unfounded assertion of another of the Jesuits, "that the musical system of the Chinese was borrowed from them by the Greeks and Egyptians, anterior to the time of Hermes or Orpheus!"