not one of the problems confronting the vocal student is
physical. They are all mental._ The writer has reached this conclusion
not from ignoring the physical, but from making a comprehensive study of
the vocal mechanism and its relation to the singer.

The anatomy and physiology of the vocal mechanism are absorbing to one
who is interested in knowing how man, through untold centuries of growth
has perfected an instrument through which he can express himself; but no
matter how far we go in the study of anatomy and physiology all we
really learn is what mind has done. If man has a more perfect and highly
organized vocal instrument than the lower animals it is because his
higher manifestation of mind has formed an instrument necessary to its
needs.

When man's ideas and needs were few and simple his vocabulary was small,
for language is the means by which members of the species communicate
with each other. Whenever man evolved a new idea he necessarily invented
some way of communicating it, and so language grew. A word is the symbol
of an idea, but invariably the idea originates the word. The word does
not originate the idea. The idea always arrives first. All we can ever
learn from the study of matter is phenomena, the result of the activity
of mind.

Thus we see that so called "scientific study" of the vocal mechanism is
at best, but a study of phenomena. It creates nothing. It only discovers
what is already taking place, and what has been going on indefinitely
without conscious direction will, in all probability, continue.

The value attached by some to the study of vocal physiology is greatly
overestimated. In fact its value is so little as to be practically
negligible. It furnishes the teacher nothing he can use in giving a
singing lesson, unless, perchance he should be so unwise as to begin the
lesson with a talk on vocal mechanism, which, by the way, would much
better come at the last lesson than the first. All we can learn from the
study of vocal physiology is the construction of the vocal instrument,
and this bears the same relation to singing that piano making bears to
piano playing. The singer and his instrument are two different things,
and a knowledge of the latter exerts very little beneficial influence on
the former.

To reach a solution of the vocal problem we must understand the relation
existing between the singer and his instrument.

The singer is a mentality, consequently everything he does is a