Mother Nature, however, is a dame of infinite varieties, and seems continually to be trying the most bizarre experiments apparently without the least prompting or justification. The products of these experiments are called ‘sports,’ and there seems no limit to their possibilities. Chimpanzees delight in thumping hollow trees and knocking pieces of wood together, while it is said that the gorilla waddles to war to the sound of the drum, improvising a substitute by beating his hands against his brawny chest. In the Western world professionalism in dancing has happily not had the blighting effect on the pursuit that it seems to have had on some other forms of pastime. But if we go to the East we find that practically all other forms of dancing have ceased to exist. We see the effect of this tendency most fully developed in China, where the recreative dancing of European society seems to be quite beyond the comprehension of a well-bred Chinese, who naïvely asks the question: ‘Why do you not pay people to dance for you?’ Stage dancing seems to be an interesting instance of the degeneration into pure luxury or something which was at one time a helpful influence to the race. This is a tendency observable in many phases of life when the pressure of evolutionary forces is somewhat relaxed. Most of the luxuries pertain to matters which at one time had a survival value, and it cannot be said that they have retired from among the evolutionary forces even to-day; but their effect, if still beneficial to the race, lies in aiding Nature to eliminate the unfit. II From the earliest times on dancing has been dependent upon music of some kind. The question whether music is older than dancing has not been answered satisfactorily by academic anthropologists yet. However, all scholars agree that the appearance of these two arts must have been more or less simultaneous, the one influencing the other. But undoubtedly the first dance music was not instrumental but vocal. The savages to-day dance most of their sexual dances to rhythmic recitation of certain words. Music is in every phase of evolution the only true essence of that which forms the subject of the dance.