ed Eastern theory of the bow.
The only evidence he adduces is its present use in the East, and the
primitive form of Eastern instruments." "I would ask how comes it that
the bow was unknown to the Greeks and the Romans? Did not Alexander
the Great conquer India and Persia? And were not those countries
better known to the ancients than to the modern until within the last
three hundred years? The Spaniards derived their instruments from the
Moors, but the bow was not among them."]

About fifty years later than the date of North's "Memoirs of Music"
appeared the famous work of Martinus Gerbertus, entitled, "De Cantu et
Musica Sacra." Among the valuable manuscripts referred to by the
author is one which supplies the earliest known representation of a
bow instrument of the Fiddle kind, and which may be accepted as a
description of German Fiddle. The date of this particular manuscript
has been ascribed by M. Fetis to the ninth century. It may possibly
have belonged to an earlier period.[13]

[Footnote 13: As the manuscript was destroyed by the fire which burnt
nearly the whole of the buildings, Abbey, Church, and Library of St.
Blasius in the Black Forest in 1768, the language of Gerbertus, who
examined the original manuscript, is worthy of some attention. After
referring to certain plates, copied from a manuscript of the year 600,
he says that "the other twenty-three representations on the following
eighth plate" (in which is included the early German Fiddle) "are from
a manuscript a _little more recent_." Whether the period of three
centuries named by M. Fetis can be considered recent is at least
questionable. The information taken from this manuscript is of
paramount importance, with reference to the Asiatic and Northern views
of the origin of the Violin. The view taken by some authorities, that
the Europeans received their earliest instructions in infantile
Fiddling from the Moors, when they conquered Spain in the eighth
century, is already overclouded by the representation of a Fiddle and
bow on this German Manuscript, even assuming it to be of the ninth
century; but if its date be given prior to the appearance of the Moors
in Europe, the Eastern view of the subject is naturally further
darkened.]

The instrument was described in the manuscript of St. Blasius as a
Lyre. Gerbertus rightly observes that it has only one string, and is
more like a Cheli.[14] He quotes writers of different epochs relative
to the meaning o