duty for the more noble trumpet. But
the distinctive feature of this, as of nearly all brass instruments
since the invention of valves, tends to a compromise instrument, which
owes its origin to the bugle. The cornet a piston is now not very
different from the valve bugle in B flat on the one hand and from the
small valve trumpet in the same key on the other. It is a hybrid
between this high pitch trumpet and the bugle, but compared with the
latter it has a much smaller bell. By the use of valves and pistons,
with which it was the first to be endowed, the cornet can easily
execute passages of consecutive notes that in the natural trumpet can
only be got an octave higher. It is a facile instrument, and double
tonguing, which is also possible with the horn and trumpet, is one of
its popular means for display. It has a harmonic compass from middle C
to C above the treble clef, and can go higher, but with difficulty. A
few lower notes, however, are easily taken with the valves.

We now come to the trombones, grand, sonorous tubes, which, existing
in three or four sizes since the sixteenth century, are among the most
potent additions on occasion to the full orchestra. Their treble can
be regarded as the English slide trumpet, but it is not exactly so.
There appears to have been as late as Bach a soprano trombone, and it
is figured by Virdung, A.D. 1511, as no larger than the field trumpet.
The trumpet is not on so large a caliber, and in the seventeenth
century had its own family of two clarinos and three tubas. The old
English name of the trombone is sackbut. The old wooden cornet, or
German zinke, an obsolete, cupped mouthpiece instrument, the real bass
of which, according to family, is the now obsolete serpent, was used
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the treble instrument in
combination with alto, tenor, and bass trombones. The leading features
of the trumpet are also found, as already inferred, in the trombone;
there is the cupped mouthpiece, the cylindrical tubing, and, finally,
a gradual increase in diameter to the bell. The slide used for the
trumpet appears for four centuries, and probably longer, in the well
known construction of the trombone. In this instrument it consists of
two cylindrical tubes parallel with each other, upon which two other
tubes communicating by a pipe at their lower ends curved in a half
circle glide without loss of air. The mouthpiece is fitted to an upper
end, and a bell to a