I have spoken of the purely rhythmical nature of the pre-drum period, and pointed out, in contrast, the musical quality of the drum.  This may seem somewhat strange, accustomed as we are to think of the drum as a purely rhythmical instrument.  The sounds given out by it seem at best vague in tone and more or less uniform in quality.  We forget that all instruments of percussion, as they are called, are direct descendants of the drum.  The bells that hang in our church towers are but modifications of the drum; for what is a bell but a metal drum with one end left open and the drum stick hung inside?

Strange to say, as showing the marvellous potency of primeval instincts, bells placed in church towers were supposed to have much of the supernatural power that the savage in his wilderness ascribed to the drum.  We all know something of the bell legends of the Middle Ages, how the tolling of a bell was supposed to clear the air of the plague, to calm the storm, and to shed a blessing on all who heard it.  And this superstition was to a certain extent ratified by the religious ceremonies attending the casting of church bells and the inscriptions moulded in them.  For instance, the mid-day bell of Strasburg, taken down during the French Revolution, bore the motto

   “I am the voice of life.”

Another one in Strasburg: 

   “I ring out the bad, ring in the good.”

Others read

   “My voice on high dispels the storm.”

   “I am called Ave Maria
    I drive away storms.”

   “I who call to thee am the Rose of the World and am called
          Ave Maria.”

The Egyptian sistrum, which in Roman times played an important role in the worship of Isis, was shaped somewhat like a tennis racquet, with four wire strings on which rattles were strung.  The sound of it must have been akin to that of our modern tambourine, and it served much the same purpose as the primitive drum, namely, to drive away Typhon or Set, the god of evil.  Dead kings were called “Osiris” when placed in their tombs, and sistri put with them in order to drive away Set.

Beside bells and rattles we must include all instruments of the tambourine and gong species in the drum category.  While there are many different forms of the same instrument, there are evidences of their all having at some time served the same purpose, even down to that strange instrument about which Du Chaillu tells us in his “Equatorial Africa”, a bell of leopard skin, with a clapper of fur, which was rung by the wizard doctor when entering a hut where someone was ill or dying.  The leopard skin and fur clapper seem to have been devised to make no noise, so as not to anger the demon that was to be cast out.  This reminds us strangely of the custom of ringing a bell as the priest goes to administer the last rites.