Music and Dancing in Nature. 281 



ing objects, with intervals of watcliing, when they 

 crouch motionless, the eyes flashing and tail waved 

 from side to side ; finally, the rush and spring, when 

 the playfellow is captured, rolled over on his back 

 and worried to imaginary death. Other species of 

 the most diverse kinds, in which voice is greatly 

 developed, join in noisy concerts and choruses j 

 many of the cats may be mentioned, also dogs and 

 foxes, capybaras and other loquacious rodents ; and 

 in the howling monkeys this kind of performance 

 rises to the sublime uproar of the tropical forest at 

 eventide. 



Birds are more subject to this universal joyous 

 instinct than mammals, and there are times when 

 some species are constantly overflowing with it; 

 and as they are so much freer than mammals, more 

 buoyant and graceful in action, more loquacious, 

 and have voices so much finer, their gladness shows 

 itself in a greater variety of ways, with more regular 

 and beautiful motions, and with melody. But every 

 species, or group of species, has its own inherited 

 form or style of performance ; and, however rude 

 and irregular this may be, as in the case of the pre- 

 tended stampedes and fights of wild cattle, that is 

 the form in which the feeling will always be ex- 

 pressed. If all men, at some exceedingly remote 

 period in their history, had agreed to express the 

 common glad impulse, which they now express in 

 such an infinite variety of ways or do not express 

 at all, by dancing a minuet, and minuet-dancing 

 had at last come to be instinctive, and taken to 

 spontaneously by children at an eai-ly period, jiist 

 as they take to walking " on their hind legs," 



