Excerpt from The Story of the Organ The object of this little work is to give an outline of the history of that wonderful outcome of human ingenuity and skill known as the organ, from documentary evidence, apart from the vague speculations of Kircher and others. The known history of the organ begins with the machine of Ctesibius, of Alexandria, in which air was forced into a trumpet by the efforts of water to "rise to its own level." In mediaeval times the force of gravity replaced that of water, weights being placed on a bellows, from which the air was thus driven into the pipes with the requisite strength. Speculations as to the nature of the organs mentioned in Genesis and elsewhere in the Scriptures have no bearing on the history of the instrument, for when, during the Reformation, the Bible was translated into various modern languages, the translators, knowing nothing of the instruments there mentioned, simply made use of musical terms familiar to them. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."