We must not suppose that these songs, which were so highly treasured, were elaborate. Sometimes they were made of no more than two or three tones of the scale. In thousands of songs there are no more than five tones and certain octave reduplications (as, for instance, in ‘Auld Lang Syne’). In most cases the more primitive popular songs are too simple to make any impression upon us at all. But often that is our fault and not theirs. Our taste has been somewhat spoiled by highly seasoned food. After a little sympathetic study of primitive songs we find them full of eloquence and pathos. II But whether or not the early songs would please us now, they were of incalculable importance in the lives of early peoples. We are inclined to regard singing as an amusement only. We forget that it once had a practical importance that is hardly to be equalled by any single institution in modern life. Men were shut up within valleys, or tied by their work to the fields. It was by singing and poetry that they became citizens of the world. For, before the days of newspapers and postal service, it was the wandering bards who took the news from city to city, from court to court, from nation to nation. They served as historians, recording in verse the great events of their own nation and others, and passing the record down to succeeding generations. They served as public libraries, conserving the legend and sentiment of nations for the reference of others. More, they conserved the teaching of religious seers, the great unwritten laws of the nation, from fathers to children. In short, all that passed between nation and nation, and between generation and generation, was transmitted in song. We wonder, of course, why these things happened in song, rather than in plain prose. But the answer is simple: verse is easier to remember than prose. All the stories, all the laws, all the culture of the nation had to be _remembered_. People’s memories served instead of libraries. And with such a mass of matter to remember, people developed memories which are almost unbelievable to-day. To retain the equivalent of hundreds of pages of prose was of course impossible. But once throw the matter into verse and the remembering of it, to a primitive man, became comparatively simple. The whole of the Iliad and Odyssey were transmitted in this way through at least three centuries before they were committed to writing. For verse somehow remembers itself; the sound remains even after the sense is gone. Prof. G. L. Kittredge, of Harvard, tells of some literary investigators in the Orient, who came upon a blind beggar. They asked him to recite poetry, and he started on a long epic of which he knew thousands of lines. It was not in the language of the time, but an old and strange tongue. They asked him what the lines meant. He did not know. He had heard them from his father, and had remembered them by the sound.