674 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



supposes a life in society of a cyclic duration, for the isolated in- 

 fant still does not speak. The first words were probably cried or 

 sung. Our very young children still sing before speaking, and 

 even begin with singing their first articulated sounds ; and not 

 till they are three or four years old is their speaking voice clearly 

 distinguished from their singing voice. 



As in the human species the singing voice is much the most 

 ancient, it has also left very deep impressions on our mentality. 

 Certain cries, certain timbres or modulations of the voice, will to- 

 day awaken in the most civilized man latent and profound im- 

 pressions, and excite emotions that seize the hearer's very heart. 

 From this psychic basis bequeathed to us by our ancestors, from 

 this mental paleontology, are derived our taste for music and its 

 emotional power. Those cries, those passionate accents, have 

 more power over us than the most moving discourse, because 

 they have been, through the long chain of ancestral generations, 

 the expression of intense feeling of which we have not ceased to 

 be susceptible. At the bottom, traced back to its origin, music is 

 nothing more than the aesthetic imitation of particularly express- 

 ive vocal emissions ; consequently its psychical roots go down 

 very deep into the past, to the time when man began to be differ- 

 entiated from the animal. It is, therefore, very much of course 

 that in all races song should constitute one of the principal ele- 

 ments of primitive aesthetics. This is a fact that we have been 

 able to verify everywhere, even among the most inferior types of 

 men, as among the Pecherais of Terra del Fuego, whose song con- 

 stitutes in itself alone all their aesthetic expression. Yet this is a 

 rare, an exceptional fact ; for usually, in primitive aesthetics, song 

 is closely associated with gestures and mimicry, which, from the 

 origin of our species, were probably secondary to the voice not yet 

 spoken, illustrating the significance of the cry ; for vocal sounds 

 and gestures are equally reflexive acts, and the voice is only the 

 result of muscular contractions, of laryngeal gestures. 



The more rudimentary articulated language is, the more ne- 

 cessary to it is the aid of mimicry. Our children gesticulate long 

 before they have learned how to talk, and they continue to do so 

 long afterward ; and we first succeed in communicating with 

 them by means of gestures. Even the adult man, of the highest 

 civilization, rarely confines himself to articulate language alone. 

 Nearly always gestures are added automatically to the words, to 

 sustain them, as comment, or to moderate or intensify the expres- 

 sion. The refined rhetoric of artists in speech makes great use of 

 mimicry, and the ancient rhetors of Rome esteemed action very 

 highly. The literary aesthetics of all primitive peoples, therefore, 

 comprised at once song, speech, and gestures. Thus we have 

 seen the men of all countries and all races beginning in literary 



