ABSTRACT
Two letters preserved in the Bodleian Library are all that survive of a correspondence between Thomas Salmon and John Wallis which, it is implied, included at least two earlier letters from Wallis and one from Salmon. Salmon had apparently conveyed 'papers' to Wallis, which may have been in effect a draft of the Proposal or of part of it; Wallis had returned these and supplied Salmon with some information about the possibility of using moveable frets. Salmon was thinking in terms of a system of fingerboards which could be exchanged when the keynote changed, the system he would present in the Proposal. Wallis was advocating the different mechanical system which he would advocate in his 'Remarks' on the Proposal: individually moveable frets which could slide up and down the fingerboard, perhaps in grooves. At this stage the tuning system under discussion was simply the syntonic diatonic scale. Salmon's contact with 'eminent musicians' in London was evidently begun.
