256 PRIMITIVE MUSIC 
only say then that the inhabitants of Hindustan are 
not musical, or that their music is not pleasing to 
us Europeans; or we may go further and say that 
music has greatly developed in the West only; that 
compared with European music that of Asia, for all 
its ancient surviving civilisations, is of little more 
regard to us than that of aboriginal America, Africa 
and Australasia. I have said in an early chapter that 
palaeolithic man probably had teeth-gnashing musical 
performances; we know too that he was capable of 
higher things, that he had the artistic mind; we can 
handle the fossilised bone flute with which he "gave 
the soft winds a voice" not less than a thousand 
centuries ago. And before he made him a flute of 
bone he had doubtless piped on a reed in many forms 
for ages, and was perhaps altogether something of a 
cannibal Pan. 
That very ancient music is lost beyond recovery: 
the question we are now concerned with is the origin 
of music, especially in man. The singing of the savages 
to which I have listened on the pampas and in Pata- 
gonia is a monotonous chant, not unpleasing to the 
ear, since the voice is often of an agreeable quality, 
but after a time it palls on you, and revolting 
against it, I have said that I would prefer to listen 
to the howling of canines, which is quite as tuneful, 
especially of the nobler Species, heard in desert 
lands forlorn " the wolf's long howl from Oonalaska's 
shore," for example. The chief point in the chanting 
of savages is that we recognise it as a reproduction of 
passionate speech, spoken or chanted without passion, 
