e, such as drums and dulcimers, were strapped to the
body, all of which points to the eminently warlike character
of the people. Instead of clapping the hands to mark the time
as did the Egyptians, they stamped their feet. The dulcimer
was somewhat like a modern zither, and may be said to contain
the germ of our piano; for it was in the form of a flat case,
strapped to the body and held horizontally in front of the
player. The strings were struck with a kind of plectrum,
held in the right hand, and were touched with the left hand
immediately afterwards to stop the vibration, just as the
dampers in the pianoforte fall on the string the moment the
key is released. There existed among the Chaldeans a science
of music, which, of course, is a very different thing from
practical music, but it was so imbued with astronomical
symbolism that it seems hardly worth while to consider
it here. The art of Babylonia and Assyria culminated in
architecture and bas-relief sculpture, and it is chiefly
valuable as being the germ from which Greek art was developed.

In considering Chinese music one has somewhat the same feeling
as one would have in looking across a flat plain. There are no
mountains in Chinese music, and there is nothing in its history
to make us think that it was ever anything but a more or less
puerile playing with sound; therefore there is no separating
modern Chinese music from that of antiquity. To be sure,
Confucius (about 500 B.C.) said that to be well governed
a nation must possess good music. Pythagoras, Aristotle,
and Plato, in Greece, said the same thing, and their maxims
proved a very important factor in the music of ancient times,
for the simple reason that an art controlled by government can
have nothing very vital about it. Hebrew music was utterly
annihilated by laws, and the poetic imagination thus pent
up found its vent in poetry, the result being some of the
most wonderful works the world has ever known. In Egypt, this
current of inspiration from the very beginning was turned toward
architecture. In Greece, music became a mere stage accessory
or a subject for the dissecting table of mathematics; in China,
we have the dead level of an obstinate adherence to tradition,
thus proving Sir Thomas Browne's saying, "The mortallest enemy
unto knowledge, and that which hath done the greatest execution
upon truth, hath been a peremptory adhesion unto tradition,
and more especially the establishing of our own bel