e
animate powers that had nothing in common with him; for what
the intellect cannot explain the imagination magnifies.

Fear, then, was the strongest emotion. Therefore auxiliary aids
to express and cause fear were necessary when the speech symbols
for fear, drifting further and further away from expressing the
actual thing, became words, and words were inadequate to express
and cause fear. In that vague groping for sound symbols which
would cause and express fear far better than mere words, we
have the beginning of what is gradually to develop into music.

We all know that savage nations accompany their dances by
striking one object with another, sometimes by a clanking of
stones, the pounding of wood, or perhaps the clashing of stone
spearheads against wooden shields (a custom which extended until
the time when shields and spears were discarded), meaning thus
to express something that words cannot. This meaning changed
naturally from its original one of being the simple expression
of fear to that of welcoming a chieftain; and, if one wishes
to push the theory to excess, we may still see a shadowy
reminiscence of it in the manner in which the violinists of
an orchestra applaud an honoured guest--perchance some famous
virtuoso--at one of our symphony concerts by striking the
backs of their violins with their bows.

To go back to the savages. While this clashing of one object
against another could not be called the beginning of music, and
while it could not be said to originate a musical instrument,
it did, nevertheless, bring into existence music's greatest
prop, rhythm, an ally without which music would seem to be
impossible. It is hardly necessary to go into this point in
detail. Suffice it to say that the sense of rhythm is highly
developed even among those savage tribes which stand the
lowest in the scale of civilization to-day, for instance,
the Andaman Islanders, of whom I shall speak later; the same
may be said of the Tierra del Fuegians and the now extinct
aborigines of Tasmania; it is the same with the Semangs of
the Malay Peninsula, the Ajitas of the Philippines, and the
savages inhabiting the interior of Borneo.

As I have said, this more or less rhythmic clanking of stones
together, the striking of wooden paddles against the side of
a canoe, or the clashing of stone spearheads against wooden
shields, could not constitute the first musical instrument. But
when some savage first struck a hollow tree an