For the past year, I have spent untold hours studying, and sounding out, two pages in an old book: Hans Sloane’s 1707 Voyage to the Islands. It’s a beautiful object, large, leather-bound, full of images of trees and shells and spiders and fruit. But my colleagues David Garner Ph.D. ’14 and graduate student Mary Caton Lingold and I keep coming back to two pages of music—an evanescent fragment offered to us from across the centuries.