ity; they dance with pain, or sometimes with savage glee at
the suffering of others; they delight in mimic combats, or in animal
plays and disguises. There are such things as Courting-dances, when
the mature male and female go through a ritual together--not only in
civilized ball-rooms and the back-parlors of inns, but in the farmyards
where the rooster pays his addresses to the hen, or the yearling bull
to the cow--with quite recognized formalities; there are elaborate
ceremonials performed by the Australian bower-birds and many other
animals. All these things--at any rate in children and animals--come
before speech; and anyhow we may say that LOVE-RITES, even in mature
and civilized man, hardly ADMIT of speech. Words only vulgarize love and
blunt its edge.

So Dance to the savage and the early man was not merely an amusement or
a gymnastic exercise (as the books often try to make out), but it was
also a serious and intimate part of life, an expression of religion and
the relation of man to non-human Powers. Imagine a young dancer--and
the admitted age for ritual dancing was commonly from about eighteen
to thirty--coming forward on the dancing-ground or platform for the
INVOCATION OF RAIN. We have unfortunately no kinematic records, but it
is not impossible or very difficult to imagine the various gestures
and movements which might be considered appropriate to such a rite in
different localities or among different peoples. A modern student of
Dalcroze Eurhythmics would find the problem easy. After a time a certain
ritual dance (for rain) would become stereotyped and generally adopted.
Or imagine a young Greek leading an invocation to Apollo to STAY SOME
PLAGUE which was ravaging the country. He might as well be accompanied
by a small body of co-dancers; but he would be the leader and chief
representative. Or it might be a WAR-DANCE--as a more or less magical
preparation for the raid or foray. We are familiar enough with accounts
of war-dances among American Indians. C. O. Muller in his History and
Antiquities of the Doric Race (1) gives the following account of the
Pyrrhic dance among the Greeks, which was danced in full armor:--"Plato
says that it imitated all the attitudes of defence, by avoiding a thrust
or a cast, retreating, springing up, and crouching-as also the opposite
movements of attack with arrows and lances, and also of every kind of
thrust. So strong was the attachment to this dance at Sparta that, long
a