172 DIVERSIONS OF A NATURALIST 



It is established that in mankind, as well as many 

 animals, when in a state of emotion, movement and 

 gesture, as well as the vocal utterance, take on a 

 rhythmic character, that is to say, become a dance and 

 a song. The emotion is not necessarily that of amorous 

 passion ; in mankind it is frequently of a warlike or 

 religious character, and is worked up by the sympathy, 

 imitativeness, and desire for unison in expression which 

 is common in troops or large gatherings of animals of 

 social habits. Man presents a more advanced develop- 

 ment in variety, sensitiveness, and abandonment to social 

 or combined action and expression than do other animals, 

 and this is equally true of the more civilized and of the 

 more barbarous races. Apparently in obedience to the 

 same tendencies as those which convert simple forms of 

 movement into a rhythmic dance, the speech of man, 

 under conditions of emotion, assumes a rhythmic form, so 

 that dancing bears the same relation to the ordinary 

 movements of locomotion and gesture which verse does 

 to ordinary speech, or, again, which song bears to mere 

 exclamations and cries, indicative of feeling. Dancing is 

 the universal and most primitive expression of that sense 

 of rhythm which is a widely distributed attribute of the 

 nervous system in animals generally. In primitive men 

 it is a simple but often very violent demonstration of 

 strong emotion, such as social joy, religious exaltation, 

 martial ardour, or amatory passion. The voice and the 

 facial muscles, as well as those of the limbs and body, 

 are affected, and the dancers derive an intense pleasure 

 from the excitement, which so far from exhausting them 

 leads them on to more and more violent rhythmic or 

 undulatory action. In its purest form this ecstatic 

 condition is seen in the spinning dervishes. It was 

 developed into the mad and dangerous festivals of the 

 worshippers of Bacchus and other deities in ancient 



