FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD 31 



danced in rhythm with their songs. To hear is a 

 greater means of revelation than to see. One feels 

 even closer to those Australian natives as their strange 

 words and songs issue from imprisonment in the phono- 

 graph, than when one sees them in the film pictures 

 actually beating time with feet and hands and imitating 

 the movements of animals. To receive, as one sits in a 

 London lecture-room, the veritable appeal of these remote 

 and inaccessible things to both the eye and the ear 

 simultaneously, is indeed the most thrilling experience I 

 can remember. With a feeling of awe, almost of terror, 

 we recognize as we gaze at and listen to the records 

 brought home by Professor Baldwin Spencer that we 

 are intruding into a vast and primitive Nature-reserve 

 where even humanity itself is still in the state of child- 

 hood — submissive to the great mother, without the 

 desire to destroy her control or the power to substitute 

 man's handiwork for hers. 



