To point this out, by way of introduction to the first thoughtful attempt to put the material for a valid conclusion as to the origin of poetic form, in order for the unspecialized reader, is not to subtract anything from the difficulty of the task, nor to minimize the importance of the result. So careless has American scholarship been of our rich resources in this direction, that merely for Miss Barnes to have realized their richness and to have collected illustrative examples of them from the widely scattered and occasionally obscure sources, implies not only a general background of wide literary knowledge, but a fund of literary intelligence and much industry. It also implies a quality of restraint not infrequently lacking from such undertakings, in not attempting to bridge the gaps and supply the missing links by even the most plausible theory. Such restraint in view of the usual American demand for a complete tabloid statement, an assumption that does away with the necessity for further inquiry, is so much the more unusual that some of the credit for making this inquiry accessible surely devolves not only on the University in which it could take place, but upon the publisher who ventures to present it. Merely by collecting from authentic sources, by discarding doubtful examples and by intelligent grouping of the best translations of Amerindian lyrics, according to their formative tendency, Miss Barnes has done more than perhaps she herself realizes, to uncover the influences at work on the primitive poetic impulse, to crystallize it into forms best suited to the expression of a progressively higher poetic content. To one who reads her simple statement of the relation of sacred numbers, fours and sixes and sevens, to what Miss Barnes calls the “thought rhythm” as determining the form of primitive verse, and reads it without other knowledge of Indians than is included in these pages, it will scarcely appear that the still profounder influence is the natural environment, determining the force of climate, landscape line, and food succession in the cultural life of the particular tribe. But to one familiar with environmental distinctions between Zuñi and Iroquois and Omaha, there will be distinctive pleasure in tracing relationships between verse forms and the known formative features of the given landscape. To such a reader there will also appear intimate relations between the repetitive pattern of formal elements, the range and interdependence of dance movements, and of decorative patterns of beadwork and textiles. It would, in fact, be very little trouble to accompany each poem in this collection with an appropriate design either of gesture or decorative elements, drawn from the life of that tribe, in which the distribution of formative elements would make a pattern recognizably that of the poem. As for example, in the Paiute _Lament of a Man for His Son_, the gesture of the