The boatman sings all day long, keeping time with his paddle; the woman pounds grain in time with her chants; the farmer, with his hoe. Joy, grief, love, pain, are all expressed in spontaneous song. In some regions, professional musicians chant the chronicles of their tribes. Sometimes the strolling minstrel sings the folklore, reciting the experiences of men with animals, of animals with animals, acting the parts as he sings the story. In writing of these, Miss Kingsley thus closes her vivid description: “O! that was something like a song! It would have roused a rock to enthusiasm; a civilized audience would have smothered its singer with bouquets!” Dancing, too, is a mode of expressing feeling, almost universal. Scarcely a night but somewhere in a village the dance is in progress. Among all people, indeed, the bodily expression of inward emotion is the natural ritual of communication. The savage does not find vent for his emotions in the numberless ways acquired by civilized people—through writing, painting, the drama, discoursive language and the like; but he combines them all in the dance, just as at other times they are all expressed in music. It is a mistake to suppose that his dancing is always sensuous and frivolous. There is enough of this, it is true; but at times his deepest emotions are also thus expressed. There is the dance of religious fervor, of preparation for war, of celebration of victory, of lament for loss, in the planting time, and in the harvest. Such dances inspire devotion, courage, industry, patriotism, and tribal unity in a common cause. But the aesthetics of the Negro are still more vividly and luridly illustrated in his personal decorations, at all times from a sense of beauty, sometimes as tribal insignia. Tattooing, in some tribes; painting, in most of them; the wearing of ornaments on foreheads, in cheeks or lips or ears or nose; the filing of teeth, or even the extraction of one or more, are usual forms of decorations. Body-painting is the practice of the Nile tribes; and, in the west, the dyeing of hands, feet, eyebrows, and lips. Artistic head-dresses and the dyeing of hair seem popular among many tribes. In the cotton area, the use of fancy dyed cloth prevails. The styles are graceful and picturesque. Where straw goods are made, the head-dress is both useful and ornamental a high degree. A natural question is, to what is the backwardness of the Negro in Africa due? This is not a merely forensic question. To prejudiced people, it is dismissed as a waste of time, since to such people the Negro is incapable of anything better. But prejudice is, of all mental conditions, the least favorable to the satisfactory solution of any question. Our question has had varying answers from many students, among which the following, given in Dowd’s _Negro Races_, seems a conservative mean.