novel organ has lately been erected by the Prince Brancaforte, upon a hill in his park, near Messina: it is supplied with wind by a wind-mill, and can be distinctly heard two or three miles distant."
Probably the Italian prince thought that he had hit upon a novelty when he erected his wind-mill organ; but we now find that his device had been anticipated more than eighteen hundred years before.
Organs were early introduced into the Christian Church—indeed at a much earlier period than is commonly assigned. According to Julianus, a Spanish bishop who flourished in 450, they were in use in his time. Aldhelm the Anglo-Saxon, who died in 709, mentions them, and speaks of the gilding of the external pipes.[1] This passage in the De Laude Virginum, as Mr. Sharon Turner justly observes, is alone sufficient to refute the generally received story of Muratori, that
- ↑ Bibliotheca Maxima Patrum, tom, xiii, p. 3. See also Sharon Turner's Anglo-Saxons, iv, p. 447.
