MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS - online book

The History And Development Of Musical Instruments From The Earliest Times.

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	CHAPTER II.
	A really complete account of all the musical instruments from the earliest time known to us would require much more space than can here be afforded. We can attempt only a concise historical survey. We venture to hope that the illustrations interspersed throughout the text will to the intelligent reader elucidate many facts which, for the reason stated, are touched upon but cursorily. Pre-historic Relics. A musical relic has recently been exhumed in the department of Dordogne in France, which was constructed in an age when the fauna of France included the reindeer, the rhinoceros, and the mammoth, the hyaena, the bear, and the cave-lion. It is a small bone somewhat less than two inches in length, in which is a hole, evidently bored by means of one of the little flint knives which men used before acquaintance with the employment of metal for tools and weapons. Many of these flints were found in the same place with the bones. Only about half a dozen of the bones, of which a considerable number have been exhumed, possess the artificial hole. We give a woodcut of one of them. M. Lartet surmises the perforated bone to have been used as a whistle in hunting animals. It is the first digital phalanx of a ruminant, drilled to a certain depth by a smooth cylindrical bore on its lower surface near the expanded upper articulation. On

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