Unpublished paper, 'The scholar's lute among the Chinese' by Lay

Description

Lay describes a stringed instrument known as the kin [ch'in], which was played by Confucius and the sages of antiquity, and is therefore held sacred by men of letters. It is made of the Woo-tung or Dryandra cordifolia. Lay describes the instrument as 'convex above and plane below' with 'two quadrangular apertures in the plane surface, which open into as many hollows within the body of the instrument'. The instrument has seven strings of different diameters, which pass over the smaller end, and are distributed between two immovable pegs below. There is a bridge at the wider end for the strings to pass over, and pegs to tighten the strings. The length of the sounding-board is divided by thirteen studs placed so that the length of each string is divided into sections as far as the eighth subdivision, with the omission of the seventh. The number of sections is represented by the arithmetical series 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 0, 8. Lay enters into an examination of the musical theory of the sounds produced by this instrument.

Includes one figure of the instrument.

Subject: Mathematics / Music

Received 5 March 1840. Communicated by S H [Samuel Hunter] Christie.

Whilst the Royal Society declined to publish this paper in full, an abstract of the paper was published in volume 4 of Abstracts of the Papers Printed in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London [later Proceedings of the Royal Society] as 'The scholar's lute among the Chinese'.

Reference number

AP/25/11

Earliest possible date

1840

Physical description

Ink on paper

Page extent

10 pages

Format

Drawing
Manuscript