d continued in the Egyptian arghool--the clarinet is the most recent
member of the wood wind band. The reed initiating the tone by the
player's breath is a broad, single, striking or beating reed, so
called because the vibrating tongue touches the edges of the body of
the cutting or framing. A cylindrical pipe, as that of the clarinet,
drops, approximately, an octave in pitch when the column of air it
contains is set up in vibration by such a reed, because the reed
virtually closes the pipe at the end where it is inserted, and like a
stopped organ pipe sets up a node of maximum condensation or
rarefaction at that end. This peculiarity interferes with the
resonance of the even-numbered partials of the harmonic scale, and
permits only the odd-numbered partials, 1, 3, 5, and so on, to sound.
The first harmonic, as we find in the clarinet, is therefore the third
partial, or twelfth of the fundamental note, and not the octave, as in
the oboe and flute.

In the oboe the shifting of the nodes in a conical tube open at its
base, and narrowing to its apex, permits the resonance of the complete
series of the harmonic scale, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and upward. The flute has
likewise the complete series, because through the blowhole it is a
pipe open at both ends. But while stating the law which governs the
pitch and harmonic scale of the clarinet, affirmed equally by
observation and demonstration, we are left at present with only the
former when regarding two very slender, almost cylindrical reed pipes,
discovered in 1889 by Mr. Flinders Petrie while excavating at Fayoum
the tomb of an Egyptian lady named Maket. Mr. Petrie dates these pipes
about 1100 B.C., and they were the principal subject of Mr.
Southgate's recent lectures upon the Egyptian scale.

Now Mr. J. Finn, who made these ancient pipes sound at these lectures
with an arghool reed of straw, was able upon the pipe which had, by
finger holes, a tetrachord, to repeat that tetrachord a fifth higher
by increased pressure of blowing, and thus form an octave scale,
comprising eight notes. "Against the laws of nature," says a friend of
mine, for the pipe having dropped more than an octave through the
reed, was at its fundamental pitch, and should have overblown a
twelfth.

But Mr. Finn allows me to say with reference to those reeds, perhaps
the oldest sounding musical instruments known to exist, that his
experiments with straw reeds seem to indicate low, medium, and high
octave regi