ent art work in which materials of various degrees of hardness
and texture have been employed, and which require the attention of a
restorer of extended knowledge and mechanical dexterity. There is in
connection with all of this a kind of law keeping pace with the
necessities of the hour. If the works of art of a perishable nature
become recognised as more and more valuable during the onward march
of time, they receive proportional attention from upper-class or
highly skilled workmen. A costly work of art in need of repair or
restoration is placed in the hands of an artificer whose reputation
warrants the confidence of the owner. The works of art, however, with
which our subject is connected, differ in important particulars from
those for which gratification of the senses is to be favoured solely
through the medium of the eye; they not only frequently demand the
exercise of mechanical ingenuity of no mean order for purposes of
restoration in regard to general appearance, but further and
additionally, the no less important details concerned in a renewal,
so far as may be possible, of their powers for the exhibition of
acoustical properties such as were implanted in them by their original
constructors. In the instance of a re-uniting of separated pieces, the
insertion of fresh material to fill up spaces that must not be left
open, strengthening, or even renewal of such parts as may have become
worn away or--as is too often met with--"honey-combed" from the inroads
of those vandals of all time known as "the worm," all the supporting,
rebuilding of the interior and re-decoration of the exterior must be
taken chiefly as means to an end, that of the resumption of its rightful
position among friends or rivals in the same line.

This restitution becomes of increasing importance and necessity every
day, a condition arising from the verdict emphatically given by his
majesty the public that there are not any instruments of the violin
family ready to take the place--that is, worthily--of those made by
the principal masters of Italy during the two hundred odd years before
the commencement of the nineteenth century, and also that there does
not seem to be much probability of others arising at least for a few
generations to come. No wonder then that the most energetic searching
has been going on for a long time, not only in Italy but over the whole
of Europe, with the hope that in some out of the way court or alley
there may yet be re