Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/246

from their girdles. Melodies are played on three having a different pitch.

For the opportunity of examining the collection in the National Museum and information concerning them I am indebted to Professor Otis T. Mason, acting curator in anthropology, and to Mr. E. H. Hawley, preparator in charge of musical instruments.

The Waschamba tribe in Africa make a childish toy used like a jewsharp, quite unique in construction. Near the end of a pith-bearing stem is cut a small orifice communicating with the central bore, and a thin section of the outer bark or rind of the stem is split so as to form the tongue; this is vibrated by gently striking it with a strip of wood, at the same time that air is blown into the tube through the small orifice. The character of the sounds obtained is not given by the ethnologist who describes this primitive instrument.^[1]

In occidental countries jewsharps are manufactured on a large scale; they were manufactured in Nuremberg as early as 1524. In Birmingham one dealer, who made thousands of gross in 1895, packed them in boxes labeled 'Irish Harps,' a better designation for trade.

Regarded as an instrument with musical capabilities, the jewsharp was studied by the distinguished English scientist Sir Chas. Wheatstone in 1828. He wrote as follows:

The jewsharp consists of an elastic steel tongue riveted at one end to a frame of brass or iron (shaped like a horseshoe). The free extremity of the tongue is bent outwards to a right angle, so as to allow the finger easily to strike it when the instrument is placed to the mouth and firmly supported by the pressure of the parallel extremities of the frame against the teeth. The vibrations of the tongue itself correspond with a very low sound, but being placed before the cavity of the mouth, the form and dimensions of which are capable of various alterations by the motions of the tongue and lips, when the number of vibrations of the contained volume of air is any multiple of the original vibrations of the (steel) tongue, a sound is produced corresponding to the modification of the oral cavity.

After specifying the notes yielded by a given instrument, he continued:

This scale of notes is too incomplete and too defective to allow even the most simple melodies to be played on a single jewsharp, but the deficiencies may be supplied by employing two or more of these instruments.

And he refers to a celebrated performer, Mr. Eulenstein, of whom more anon.

The mouth forms a resonant cavity or sounding box, analogous to the body of a guitar, or to the stretched parchment of a banjo, the pitch varying with the form and size of the cavity; every one has noticed that in pronouncing the vowels a, e, i, o, u in their natural order the cubical capacity of the mouth is gradually diminished.

A few persons have acquired such proficiency in playing the jewsharp as to gain recognition in history and literature. Koch, a private in the Prussian army under Frederick the Great, played with extraor-

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1. Bernhard Ankermann, 'Die Africanischen Musik-Instrumenten,' inaugural dissertation, p. 47, Leipzig [Berlin, 1902].