In the first periods that we can make out by theory and deduction--prehistoric periods that left no records--the values sought appear to have been preponderantly sensuous and expressive. The earliest savages, like all children even to this day, who make a noise for the mere joy of it, probably used their voices and their instruments chiefly as nerve-stimulants. As in the realm of color their tastes ran to vivid reds and greens and blues, barbaric hues that assaulted the eye with a potent stimulation, so in music they were addicted to the drums and trumpets, to shoutings, and wild contortions, to whatever gave them a generous measure of sensation, whether in ears or muscles. Their motto in art was doubtless the one which some unknown humorist, perhaps a Frenchman, has attributed to the Germans, in all departments from art to gastronomy--“Plenty of it.” They did, to be sure, take a certain satisfaction in the expressiveness of their wailings and shoutings, and even in the crude formal designs into which they shaped them, generally by mere repetition of some easily recognizable formula; but their chief pleasure was to make a good, rousing noise. Of these preliminary stages in the arts of dance and song it is impossible, however, to form any certain ideas. We can only rely upon conjecture and inference, supposing that something like them preceded the stages about which we have more reliable information. The earliest music of which historic records remain is that of the Greeks. By painstaking study of the musical inscriptions on stone that have survived the centuries, of the instruments actually in existence, or described by ancient Greek writers, and of the technical treatises on music which are preserved, scholars have been able to substantiate a very few meager facts about the musical practices of the most artistic of nations. On the whole, these facts are singularly disappointing. Forgetting that music is the youngest of the arts, one is apt to expect of the Greeks that wondrous subtlety and maturity in it which they showed in sculpture, architecture, and poetry. A people possessed of so surpassing an artistic instinct, one is apt to think, must have carried its music to a high pitch of perfection. Investigation shows, nevertheless, that the reverse was the case. Indeed, no testimony could speak more eloquently for the deliberation and continuity of the growth of music than the childishness with which it was practiced by a people so gifted as the Greeks with every fineness of nature, but at the disadvantage of living too near the time at which it emerged from savagery.