THE EVOLUTION OF DANCING. 739 



The specific epidemic delusions for the cure of inebriety will 

 quickly disappear, as others have done before, and its real value 

 to science and the world will appear from future psychological 

 studies. 



THE EVOLUTION OF DANCING. 



By LEE J. VANCE. 



|~N his Descent of Man, Mr. Darwin refers briefly to the queer 

 J- antics and dancing performances of birds during the excite- 

 ments of courtship. He shows that such actions are made by the 

 male to charm the female. The plain inference is that from the 

 amatory feelings arises not love-dance only, but dancing in gen- 

 eral. 



Now, I think Mr. Spencer would say that the relation between 

 courtship and dancing is not a relation of cause and effect ; that 

 the two are simultaneous results of the same cause namely, over- 

 flow of animal spirits and vivacity of every kind. The spirit that 

 moves men to shuffle their feet, kick up their heels, even to gam- 

 bol madly until they swoon from exhaustion, may come from dif- 

 ferent feelings : now from youth, health, and exuberant spirits, 

 and now from joy or triumph, defiance and rage. 



" On with the dance ! Let joy be unconfined ; 

 No sleep till morn, when youth and pleasure meet." 



In brief, dances as representations of love-making are not fre- 

 quent among the lower races, while mystic, festive, and erotic 

 dances are numerous enough. Only among the more advanced 

 races, as the semi-civilized peoples of Asia and among the Euro- 

 pean peasantry, do we read of love-dances, and, oddly enough, 

 these are performed usually by women, not by men. 



Dancing, as an art, has been of gradual growth, and subject to 

 the law of evolution. Wild, irregular, and fantastic dancing per- 

 formances take after a while more regular and more artistic 

 forms. Thus, we are able to show how savage dances, as of the 

 Australians, develop into barbarous dances, as of the American 

 Indians, while these in turn are modified, or perhaps improved, 

 by more advanced peoples, as the Egyptians ; how, again, in the 

 early dances of Greece, in the Greek mysteries, there are survivals 

 of the " mad doings," as Plutarch calls them, of savage races. 



Folk-dancing was the first to rise into finished art. It has been 

 rightly called " the eldest of the arts," just as music is the young- 

 est. Beginning as a desire to kick, dancing grows into panto- 

 mime, which expresses a thought. As an art factor folk-dance 



