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We must pass on from five-finger exercises to the technique of extended positions of the hand, such as are to be found in scales,arpeggi, chords, thirds and octaves. I propose here to speak of scales and arpeggi only, and shall first say a word or two about scales, for which the five-finger exercises I have just been discussing are, of course, merely a preparation. But the great difficulty of scale playing, which consists in learning how to pass the thumb successfully under the other fingers, without causing a break in the continuity of the sound, is absent in five-finger exercises, though through them the student learns the right way of holding the hand on the keyboard, so that it is always ready to do its work when called upon in the scales, and also the fingers are trained to exert the necessary pressure on the key.