In order to prove the originality of the negro folk-song it has been necessary to combat the opinion of so learned a writer as Dr. Wallaschek,[63] who has contended that these songs are 'unmistakably "arranged"--not to say ignorantly borrowed--from the national songs of all nations, from military signals, well-known marches, German students' songs, etc., unless it is pure accident which has caused me to light upon traces of so many of them.' This radical statement, while it has the force of scientific deduction, is erroneous in the premises upon which these deductions are based. Dr. Wallaschek has relied too freely upon the testimony of travellers whose musical knowledge is doubtful and he has evidently confused genuine slave songs with imitations of them, such as the so-called minstrel tunes written by whites. Besides, as Mr. Krehbiel very plausibly remarks, 'similarities exist between the folk-songs of all peoples. Their overlapping is a necessary consequence of the proximity and intermingling of peoples, like modifications of language; and there are some characteristics which all songs except those of the rudest and most primitive kind must have in common. The prevalence of the diatonic scales and march-rhythms, for instance, make parallels invariable. If the use of such scales and rhythms in the folk-songs of the American negroes is an evidence of plagiarism or imitation, it is to be feared that the peoples whose music they put under tribute have been equally culpable with them. Mr. William Francis Allen--with Charles Pickard Ware and Lucy McKim Garrison the compiler of the most famous collection of negro songs[64]--while admitting that negro music is partly imitative of the music of the whites, says that 'in the main it appears to be original in the best sense of the word, and the more we examine the subject, the more genuine it appears to be.' Only in a very few songs does Mr. Allen trace strains of less familiar music which the slaves heard their masters sing or play. In spite of this, the songs themselves prove that they are the spontaneous utterances of an entire people. As in the case of all folk-songs, their first germs were uttered by individual spokesmen, but these germs were such genuine reflections of sentiments common to all and were subjected to such modifications in their travels from lip to lip as to assume the character of a composite expression of the race. They are indeed 'original and native products. They contain idioms transplanted hither from Africa, but as songs they are the product of American institutions, of the social, political, and geographical environment within which their creators were placed in America; of the joys, sorrows, and experiences which fell to their lot in America.'