The following rough mixture of Notes and Queries may serve to excite
attention to the subject. The merest beginner is aware that the letter C,
with a vertical line drawn through it, denotes _common time_; in which he
will take the C for the first letter of _common_. The symbols of old music
are four: the circle, the semicircle, and the two with vertical lines drawn
through them. After these were written 2 or 3, according as the time was
double or triple. And instead of a bar drawn through the circle or
semicircle, a central point was sometimes inserted. All these are true
facts, whether connected or unconnected, and whether any implication
conveyed in any way of stating them be true or false. The C, with a line
through it, certainly did not distinguish common time from triple. Alsted,
in his _Encyclopædia_ (1649), says that it means the _beginning of the
music_; without any reference to time. Solomon de Caus, known as having had
the steam-engine claimed for him, but who certainly wrote on music in 1615,
found the circles, &c. so variously used by different writers, that he
abandons all attempt at description or reconciliation.
May I suggest an origin for the crossed C? In the oldest church music, it
often happens that the lines are made to begin with a vertical line
impaling two lozenges, with a third lozenge between them, but on one side.
It is as if in the three of diamonds the middle lozenge were removed a
little to the left, the upper and lower ones sliding on a vertical line
until they nearly touch the removed middle one. Now if this figure were
imitated _currente calamo_, as in rapid writing, it would certainly become
an angle crossed by a vertical line; which angle would perhaps be rounded,
thus giving the crossed semicircle. Has this derivation been suggested? Or
can any one suggest a better?
But, it will be said, whence comes the full circle? It is possible that
there may have happened in this case what has happened in others: namely,
that a symbol invented, and firmly established, before the partial disuse
of Latin, may have been extended in different ways by the vernacular
writers of different countries. This has happened in the case of the words
_million_, _billion_, _trillion_, &c. The first, and the root of all, was
established early, and while no vernacular works existed, and it has only
one meaning. The others, certainly introduced at a later time, mean
different things in different countries. May it not have been that the
variety of usage which De Caus notes, may have arisen from different
writers, ignorant of each other, choosing each his own mode of deriving
other symbols from the crossed semicircle, obtained as suggested by me? I
am fully aware of the risk of such suggestions--but they have often led to
something better.