על צאצאי קין ל״אOn the Posterity of Cain and his Exile 31
א׳
1[103] “This Jubal,” he says, “is a father who invented psaltery and harp” (Gen. 4:21). Most appropriately does he give to sounding speech the title of father of music and of all musical instruments. For nature, when she had wrought for living creatures the organ or instrument of sound as chief and most perfect of all instruments, went on at once to bestow upon it the concords and the various kinds of melodies to the end that it might be a pattern made ready beforehand for the instruments that were to be fashioned artificially. So too with the ear.
ב׳
2[104] Nature turned it with her lathe and made it spherical, drawing circles within circles, lesser within larger, in order that the sound that approached it might not escape and be dispersed outside of it, but that the thing heard might be collected and enclosed within by the circles, and being as it were poured through them, be conveyed into the receptacles of the mind. We see here at once a model for the theatres seen in thriving cities, for theatres are constructed in exact imitation of the shape of the ear. So Nature, who fashioned living creatures, stretched the windpipe as though a musical scale, combining in it the enharmonic and chromatic and diatonic modes, answering to the vast variety of melodies with their shorter or longer intervals, and in this way set up a pattern of every musical instrument.