JOHN WESLEY POWELL DAVIS 



Dance to Symphony," which he prepared in 1889 at the mature 

 age of fifty-five years for delivery on as important a public oc- 

 casion as arrives in the life of an American scientist namely, 

 on his serving as, president of the American Association for 

 the Advancement of Science. In his constrained absence from 

 the meeting of the Association at Toronto, the address was 

 read by his loyal representative, G. K. Gilbert. 



The theme of this address was the simple one that 

 "Music . * . . becomes by minute increments" that is, it 

 grows, it evolves. Such a subject might have been presented 

 in the historic order of the discoveries on which the general 

 conclusion is based, with abundant citation of specific exam- 

 ples. Indeed, this order of statement was adopted a few years 

 later by Langley, when he, from the same chair, told in a most 

 charming manner "The History of a Doctrine." Powell's 

 method was altogether different. As us\ial, he gave no refer- 

 ence to authorities ; he did not mention the name of any worker 

 in his field; nor, for that matter, did he present the subject as 

 his own. He marshalled facts and inferences in such order as 

 pleased him for his own purpose, gathering them from the 

 work of other students everywhere. Their variety so evi- 

 dently exceeded the reach of one observer that it sufficed 

 merely to refer them to "the labors of an army of patient, 

 earnest, keen-visioned investigators." One of the manner- 

 isms of the address was the introduction of long series of sim- 

 ilar statements, after the fashion already indicated, apparently 

 with the intention of re-enforcing the lesson that he wished to 

 teach. Thus, in order to emphasize the varied conditions 

 under which savages dance and chant, he wrote : "At the foot 

 of the glaciers they have their homes, and walls of ice echo 

 their chants ; by mountain crags they have their homes, and 

 the rocks echo their chants ; in valleys they have their homes, 

 and the savannas are filled with their chants ; in tropical forests 

 they have their homes, and 'the sounding aisles of the dim 

 woods' ring with their chants." Some of his hearers may 

 have been confused with his abundance of rhetoric; yet such 

 was the richness of his subject that he could not make a short 

 story of it. -His beginning is very simple, as if to encourage 

 his hearers ; the opening sentence is : "A blue egg may become 



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