The difficulties of obtaining knowledge from those who know is, however, a common experience; not that knowledge is refused or withheld, but that the specialist and the neophyte seem unable to get into the same line of sight, and between the two there is often a great lack of perceptivity of the actual kind of help wanted, and the language of reply only perhaps may serve to show us what dumb creatures we are in our endeavours to understand one another.
The eleven holed pipe was found in 1888. As M. Maspero has no doubt about the age of this flute, and maintains that it dates back to the eighteenth dynasty, and as he is in the front rank of authority as an Egyptologist, we have to accept his decision, although it throws previous conclusions into confusion.
The Chinese are held to have possessed an octave scale of twelve semitones more than four thousand years ago, but heretofore we had no hint of an early existence of such amongst the Egyptians, nor of an intercourse with China which would account for identity. It is altogether mysterious, and raises new questions of affinities, and of the evolution of mind in the human race.
So far the details afforded give a new insight into the nature of the bulbed flute, they tend to support my idea of the use of the bulb for holding a concealed reed.
As it is, Egypt has revealed one secret concerning the subulone flutes, and shown that the double and triple bulbs depicted on the Etruscan vases are essentials of the structure of the flutes, and can no longer be regarded as conventional ornament.
M. Maspero sent Mr. Southgate a tracing of the bulb piece in his possession, who has obliged me with a copy of it. The dark irregular patches are due to accidental adherence of some bitumen. The numerals indicate merely proportions in the interior diameters.
Fig. 23.
In the times of the earlier civilizations, men had a wonderfully direct way of obtaining their ends; they chose the simplest means and the fittest, and the survival of their method down to our days is the best proof of a judgment almost as unerring as instinct. With all our mechanical appliances, we can do little better than modify and develop the designs we have inherited. In our wind instruments, everywhere the primitive remains, even as the type of race remains.