religious, and erotic dances, such as exist in a highly developed degree among the Australians and other savage races who have not evolved co-ordinated systematic labor.  There can, however, be no doubt that as soon as systematic work appears the importance of vocal rhythm in stimulating its energy is at once everywhere recognized.  Buecher has brought together innumerable examples of this association, and in the march music of soldiers and the heaving and hoisting songs of sailors we have instances that have universally persisted into civilization, although in civilization the rhythmical stimulation of work, physiologically sound as is its basis, tends to die out.  Even in the laboratory the influence of simple rhythm in increasing the output of work may be demonstrated; and Fere found with the ergograph that a rhythmical grouping of the movements caused an increase of energy which often more than compensated the loss of time caused by the rhythm.[89]

Rhythm is the most primitive element of music, and the most fundamental.  Wallaschek, in his book on Primitive Music, and most other writers on the subject are agreed on this point.  “Rhythm,” remarks an American anthropologist,[90] “naturally precedes the development of any fine perception of differences in pitch, of time-quality, or of tonality.  Almost, if not all, Indian songs,” he adds, “are as strictly developed out of modified repetitions of a motive as are the movements of a Mozart or a Beethoven symphony.”  “In all primitive music,” asserts Alice C. Fletcher,[91] “rhythm is strongly developed.  The pulsations of the drum and the sharp crash of the rattles are thrown against each other and against the voice, so that it would seem that the pleasure derived by the performers lay not so much in the tonality of the song as in the measured sounds arrayed in contesting rhythm, and which by their clash start the nerves and spur the body to action, for the voice which alone carries the tone is often subordinated and treated as an additional instrument.”  Groos points out that a melody gives us the essential impression of a voice that dances;[92] it is a translation of spatial movement into sound, and, as we shall see, its physiological action on the organism is a reflection of that which, as we have elsewhere found,[93] dancing itself produces, and thus resembles that produced by the sight of movement.  Dancing, music, and poetry were primitively so closely allied as to be almost identical; they were still inseparable among the early Greeks.  The refrains in our English ballads indicate the dancer’s part in them.  The technical use of the word “foot” in metrical matters still persists to show that a poem is fundamentally a dance.