June 18, 1909] 



SCIENCE 



911 



and is apt also to suffer mitigation in the 

 course of subsequent study. 



C. J. Keyser 

 Columbia University 



Hopi Songs. By Benjamin Ives Gilman, 

 Secretary of the Museum of Fine Arts, 

 Boston, Mass. Hemenway Southwestern 

 Expedition. A Journal of American Eth- 

 nology and Archaeology. Fifth and Con- 

 cluding Volume. Pp. si + 235. Boston 

 and New York, Houghton, Mifflin Company. 

 1908. 



The test of the volume is divided into three 

 sections : I., The Kote Song of the Hopi ; II., 

 The Phonographic Method; III., Notation, 

 Diagrams and Comments. Seventeen Hopi 

 songs are included in section III. A brief 

 account of The Hemenway Southwest Ex- 

 pedition closes the volume. 



The author opens his treatise by saying: 

 The study of Hopi, or Moqui, singing, to which 

 this volume is devoted, completes an inquiry into 

 Pueblo music begun in 1891 with a study of Zuni 

 melodies. The records upon which both investi- 

 ■gations have been based were obtained in Arizona 

 by Dr. J. Walter Fewkes, now of the Bureau of 

 Ethnology, Washington, at the time in charge of 

 the Hemenway Southwestern Expedition, who first 

 applied the phonograph to the preservation and 

 ■study of aboriginal folk-lore. 



Of his previous study the author writes 

 <p. 11) : 



The major thesis of the " Zuni Melodies " — that 

 Pueblo music is without scale — is strongly con- 

 firmed by this cumulative evidence. The diatonic 

 form of the Hopi songs is (o) harmonic necessity 

 or (5) apperceptive illusion. In large measure 

 their adiatonic features are at once (c) inten- 

 tional and (d) inexplicable by interpolation and 

 transposition. The minor thesis of the "Zuni 

 Melodies " — that " In this archaic stage of the 

 art the scales are not formed but forming " — is 

 rather weakened than corroborated by a closer 

 study of Pueblo music. Its bent toward change 

 inspires a doubt whether, imless by outward com- 

 pulsion, it would ever submit to the trammels of 

 A system. It appears an unhistoric rather than 

 a prehistoric art. 



Under the head Scales an Instrumental 

 Product; the Voice Determining their Gen- 



eral Form, the Ear, the Hand and the Eye 

 their Varieties, the author skillfully proceeded 

 to show that " Although the voice provides 

 the raw material for scale building," the in- 

 struments have rendered service, so that 



It would appear that while still disembodied 

 music tends to remain adiatonic, though always 

 of necessity diatonoid. Only when incarnate by 

 instrumental constraint does it chose, because it 

 must, the best of all possible yokes. 



Other factors have influenced scale develop- 

 ment so that 



Scales may result with which the voice has had 

 little to do, giving back to music, at the con- 

 venience and pleasure of ear and hand and eye, 

 a semblance of the liberty of its vocal stage. 



Under the head of Freedom, a character- 

 istic of Pueblo music, the author writes: 



Apart from the tendency to consonant intervals 

 no metes and bounds to invention manifest them- 

 selves in these melodies, and they may apparently 

 be altered by every performer. 



In this connection a footnote calls atten- 

 tion to a fact presented at Berlin in 1888 be- 

 fore the International Congress of American- 

 ists that 



The anatomists of the Hemenway Southwestern 

 Expedition found the hyoid bone of the ancient 

 skeletons exhumed on the Rio Salado exceptionally 

 elastic in structure. The position of this bone at 

 the base of the tongue makes it an important 

 factor both in speech and song. 



This fact should not be forgotten when con- 

 sidering the data presented in this volume as 

 of wide application. Nor can the statement 

 that songs "may apparently be altered by 

 every performer" be accepted as true of In- 

 dian songs in general. Accuracy in the 

 rendition of a song, particularly of one that 

 was a part of a religious ceremony, was in- 

 sisted upon. In some of the tribes a mis- 

 take, or variation, in singing a song, consti- 

 tuted so grave a matter that it put a stop to 

 the ceremony, until after a rite of contrition 

 had been performed; that being finished the 

 ceremony had to begin afresh. That there 

 were slight variations in pitch and intona- 

 tions was true, but they were such as occur 

 among ordinary singers and did not affect the 

 movement and flow of the melody, which the 



