WE derive "Dulcimer" from the Spanish "Dulcemele" as the only etymology to be offered with any show of certainty. The ProvenÇal "Lai" was in the Latin of the period "Dulcis Cantus,"—"Dulcemele" (Lat. Dulce Melos) has a kindred ring, and by the change of a liquid "Dulcimer" has become an accepted name.

The dulcimer is a variety of the psaltery or qanun, and bears the same relation to it that the modern pianoforte does to the older spinet or harpsichord. The psaltery was sounded by the fingers, either with their fleshy ends or by covering them with plectra adjusted like thimbles to produce a sharper sound; the dulcimer is a louder instrument, the sounds being produced by hammers held in the player's hands, and having elastic stems by which the necessary rebound from the strings is facilitated. The hammers have not unfrequently two coverings, a hard and a soft one, disposed upon the hammer head so that the player can, by turning the hammer, use either at will. The characteristic effect of the dulcimer, analogous to the mandoline, bandurria and other stringed instruments played with a plectrum, is the repetition of notes, producing by this artifice the impression of almost sustained sound. The Italians called the dulcimer "Salterio Tedesco," or German psaltery, but have now adopted Zimbalon; the Germans call it a "Hackbrett," or chopping board. It is generally an instrument popular among the humbler classes, and in modern times it assumes its most important rÔle as the cimbalon in the Hungarian gipsy bands. The specimen here drawn belonged to Mr. Kendrick Pyne of Manchester, and is now in the possession of Mr. H. Boddington; it is elevated upon a stand, and is in a case, from which it can be removed for performance. There is a picture inside the lid of a sunset and figures habited in seventeenth-century costumes—soldiers advancing and met by ladies apparently bearing refreshments. On the front board, which is hinged so as to be let down, there is painted on the right of the spectator a man fishing in a pond and a woman near him; while in the centre is a clump of trees, and, on the left, a man and a woman meeting. The instrument itself is decorated with painted flowers in panels, between which are black and white chequers. It is probably Italian. The dimensions of it are—in the greatest width, 3 feet 4½ inches, in the least, 1 foot 11 inches. The angles of the sides measure 1 foot 1½ inch each. The depth of the instrument is 3½ inches. The height of the stand is 2 feet 2 inches.

There are seventeen notes of four wire strings tuned in unison for each note in this instrument. There may be more notes in a dulcimer and the number of strings may vary, groups of three, and even five unisons being found alternating with four in old dulcimers. The wire was brass in old instruments and is steel in modern ones. Owing to increase of tension due to the upward straining of the wire by the bridges on the sound-board, the places for the bridges cannot be determined by observing the simple ratios of partial tones, but have to be found empirically. As in all old stringed instruments there are sound-holes in the sound-board, in old Italian dulcimers decorated with beautiful arabesques or roses. In old Italian and also the Chinese dulcimers (Yang-ch'in, or foreign psaltery) the sound-board bridges are joined in two rows, the strings passing alternately over, and through openings made in them. They pass over brass wires on the summits of the bridges, and at the edges of the dulcimer over other brass wires that form, on either side, what may be called nuts. In Asiatic and modern European instruments the bridges are separate studs. The longest stretches of wire pass over the right-hand bridge and through the openings in the left-hand bridge. The shorter stretches are reversed, passing over the left-hand bridge. In European dulcimers the shorter stretches, struck to the right of the left-hand bridge, are an octave above the longer stretches struck to the left of the right-hand bridge. The shortest stretches are the remainder of the octave strings, which, carried over the left bridge to the left edge of the dulcimer, are so tuned as to be a fifth above the octave series. The right-hand remainder is not used. There are consequently three series of notes, a fundamental, an octave and a twelfth; thus expressed in notation, the perpendicular lines representing the nuts, and the circles the position of the bridges.

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These are the lowest notes of the three series. The scale usually ascends from them in diatonic succession, in the lowest series with F natural instead of F sharp. In the last century attempts were made to tune some part of the scale chromatically, but, as far as I have met with examples, on no ascertainable system. The Chinese substitute sixths, and in the two lowest sevenths, for the octave; by the sevenths the lowest semitone is missed, otherwise the scale continues, as in the European dulcimer, in heptatonic order. The brass wire upon the bridges is an old spinet contrivance. The dulcimer is tuned with a hammer or key like a pianoforte, but, unlike the piano and other key-board instruments, has no damping contrivance.

We may look for the precursor of both the European and Chinese dulcimers in an Assyrian ancestor of the Persian Santir, or, it may be, in a more remote Babylonian instrument. Dulcimers are represented on Assyrian monuments.

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