The wide distribution of most of these forms among Europeans, Mongols, Malay, and Negro proves the independence of literary development from racial descent. It shows that it is one of the characteristics of the enormously extended cultural area, which embraces almost the whole of the Old World, and which in other features also appears in distinct contrast to the New World. I mention here only the development of a formal judicial procedure, founded on the taking of evidence, the oath and the ordeal and the absence of this complex in America; and the absence in America of the belief in obsession and of the evil eye which are widely known in the Old World. The characteristics of poetry lead us to a consideration of the forms of music. The only kind of music that is of universal occurrence is song; and the source of music must therefore be sought here. Universally valid characteristics of song will also be general principles of music. Two elements are common to all song: rhythm and fixed intervals. We have shown before that rhythm must not be conceived on the basis of our modern regularity as a sequence of measures of equal duration and somewhat free subdivision, but its form is much more general. Apparent irregularity must not be misinterpreted as a lack of rhythm, for in each repetition of a song the same order is preserved without change. Precisely as the rhythmic order in primitive decorative art is more complex than our own, so also is the rhythm of music liable to be more complex. Regular measures do occur, but they are not so rigidly confined to 2, 3 or 4 part time, as our own, but 5 and 7 part sequences frequently occur, in fact predominate in some types of music: five part rhythms are common in northwestern America, 7 part rhythms in southern Asia. Alterations of rhythms that seem unfamiliar to us are found, as well as very complex sequences that cannot be reduced to measures at all. We may best describe the rhythm of many types of primitive music as consisting of a regular sequence of musical phrases of irregular structure. Sometimes the phrases expand into long rhythmic units without recognisable subdivision.