If the language of poetical extravagance may be admitted into serious historical composition, we may accept this theatrical picture as an allegorized image of a truth. Although we speak no longer of a “first man,” and although we have the best reasons to suppose that the earliest vocal efforts of our anthropoid progenitors were a softly modulated love call or a strident battle cry rather than a _sursum corda_; yet taking for our point of departure that stage in human development when art properly begins, when the unpremeditated responses to simple sensation are supplemented by the more stable and organized expression of a soul life become self-conscious, then we certainly do find that the earliest attempts at song are occasioned by motives that must in strictness be called religious. The savage is a very religious being. In all the relations of his simple life he is hedged about by a stiff code of regulations whose sanction depends upon his recognition of the presence of invisible powers and his duties to them. He divines a mysterious presence as pervasive as the atmosphere he breathes, which takes in his childish fancy diverse shapes, as of ghosts, deified ancestors, anthropomorphic gods, embodied influences of sun and cloud. In whatever guise these conceptions may clothe themselves, he experiences a feeling of awe which sometimes appears as abject fear, sometimes as reverence and love. The emotions which the primitive man feels under the pressure of these ideas are the most profound and persistent of which he is capable, and as they involve notions which are held in common by all the members of the tribe (for there are no sceptics or nonconformists in the savage community), they are formulated in elaborate schemes of ceremony. The religious sentiment inevitably seeks expression in the assembly—“the means,” as Professor Brinton says, “by which that most potent agent in religious life, collective suggestion, is brought to bear upon the mind”—the liturgy, the festival, and the sacrifice.[1] By virtue of certain laws of the human mind which are evident everywhere, in the highest civilized condition as in the savage, the religious emotion, intensified by collective suggestion in the assembly, will find expression not in the ordinary manner of thought communication, but in those rhythmic and inflected movements and cadences which are the natural outlet of strong mental excitement when thrown back upon itself. These gestures and vocal inflections become regulated and systematized in order that they may be permanently retained, and serve in their reaction to stimulate anew the mental states by which they were occasioned. Singing, dancing, and pantomime compose the means by which uncivilized man throughout the world gives expression to his controlling ideas. The needed uniformity in movement and accent is most easily effected by rhythmical beats; and as these beats are more distinctly heard, and also