even by much less complex kinds of muscular movement.  This has been clearly determined, for instance, by Fere, in the course of a long and elaborate series of experiments dealing with the various influences that modify work as measured by Mosso’s ergograph.  This investigator found that muscular movement is the most efficacious of all stimulants in increasing muscular power.[39] It is easy to trace these pleasurable effects of combined narcotic and stimulant motion in everyday life and it is unnecessary to enumerate its manifestations.[40]

Dancing is so powerful an agent on the organism, as Sergi truly remarks (Les Emotions, p. 288), because its excitation is general, because it touches every vital organ, the higher centers no longer dominating.  Primitive dancing differs very widely from that civilized kind of dancing—­finding its extreme type in the ballet—­in which energy is concentrated into the muscles below the knee.  In the finest kinds of primitive dancing all the limbs, the whole body, take part.  For instance, “the Marquisan girls,” Herman Melville remarked in Typee, “dance all over, as it were; not only do their feet dance, but their arms, hands, fingers,—­ay, their very eyes seem to dance in their heads.  In good sooth, they so sway their floating forms, arch their necks, toss aloft their naked arms, and glide, and swim, and whirl,” etc.

If we turn to a very different people, we find this characteristic of primitive dancing admirably illustrated by the missionary, Holden, in the case of Kaffir dances.  “So far as I have observed,” he states, “the perfection of the art or science consists in their being able to put every part of the body into motion at the same time.  And as they are naked, the bystander has a good opportunity of observing the whole process, which presents a remarkably odd and grotesque appearance,—­the head, the trunk, the arms, the legs, the hands, the feet, bones, muscles, sinews, skin, scalp, and hair, each and all in motion at the same time, with feathers waving, tails of monkeys and wild beasts dangling, and shields beating, accompanied with whistling, shouting, and leaping.  It would appear as though the whole frame was hung on springing wires or cords.  Dances are held in high repute, being the natural expression of joyous emotion, or creating it when absent.  There is, perhaps, no exercise in greater accordance with the sentiments or feelings of a barbarous people, or more fully calculated to gratify their wild and ungoverned passions.” (W.C.  Holden, The Kaffir Race, 1866, p. 274.)

Dancing, as the highest and most complex form of muscular movement, is the most potent method of obtaining the organic excitement muscular movement yields, and thus we understand how from the earliest zooelogical ages it has been brought to the service of the sexual instinct as a mode of attaining tumescence.  Among savages this use of dancing works harmoniously with the various