It is to be hoped that some devoted historian will come forward before it is too late and tell us the history of this very special form of theatrical art, the only one indigenous to our soil. Indeed, now that our American universities are paying attention to the drama, what more alluring theme for the dissertation demanded of all candidates for the doctorate of philosophy than an inquiry into the rise and fall of negro-minstrelsy? In the late Laurence Hutton's conscientious and entertaining volume on the 'Curiosities of the American Stage,' there is a chapter in which the subject is treated historically, altho the chronicler wasted much of his precious space in considering the succession of sable characters in the regular drama--Shakspere's Othello, Southerne's Oroonoko, Bickerstaff's Mungo, Boucicault's Pete (in the 'Octoroon'), Uncle Tom, Topsy, Eliza, and their companions (in the undying dramatization of Mrs. Stowe's story). These were all parts in plays wherein white characters were prominent. The first performer of a song-and-dance, that is of a sketch in which the darky performer was sufficient unto himself, and was deprived of any support from persons of another complexion, seems to have been "Jim Crow" Rice--the title of whose lively lyric survives in the name bestowed upon the cars reserved for colored folk on certain Southern railroads. Rice found his pattern in an old negro who did a peculiar step after he had sung to a tune of his own contriving: Wheel about, turn about; Do jus' so: An' ebery time I turn about, I jump Jim Crow. Rice carried Jim Crow to England, and he made a specialty of dandy darkies. But he was not the discoverer of negro-minstrelsy, as we know it, altho he blazed the trail for it. Indeed, it was quite probably due to the influence of Rice and his darky dandies that the negro minstrels confined their efforts to the imitation of the town negro rather than of the plantation negro, the field-hand of the Uncle Remus type. Rice first impersonated Jim Crow in the late twenties, and it was in the middle of the thirties that he went to England. And it was in the early forties that Dan Emmett, Frank Brower, Billy Whitlock, and Dick Pelham happened to meet by accident in a New York boarding-house, and amused themselves with songs accompanied by the banjo, the tambourine, and the bones. Pleased by the result of their exercises, they appeared together at a benefit, and negro-minstrelsy was born. At first there was no differentiation into Interlocutors and End-men; they all took an equal share in the more or less improvised dialog; they sang, and they played, and they danced the 'Essence of Old Virginny.'