300 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s., i, 1899
on the Midway Plaisance. I am indebted to Dr Washington Matthews for the opportunity of studying his collection of phono- graphic records of Navaho songs, and am of course acquainted with the published songs studied by Theodor Baker, Stephen Powers, and Benjamin Ives Gilman. Dr Carl Lumholtz gave me a number of songs which he collected in Mexico among the Tara- humare and Tepehuane, tribes seldom visited by white men ; and Mr Charles F. Lummis, of Los Angeles, introduced me to several Tigua Indians of the pueblo of Isleta, New Mexico, from whose singing I recorded some twenty or thirty songs. Other songs have come to me from different quarters during the three , years I have spent in California, and last summer I visited the
\ Coahuia reservation in that state and obtained some very valua-
f ble material. Quite recently I have obtained from Dr Lumholtz
4 several new songs from Mexican tribes not hitherto reached. I
» have also listened to several hundred songs recorded on the grapho-
a phone by Mr La Flesche, including rituals from at least a dozen
tribes and half a dozen linguistic stocks, some of which had never before been exploited. Many of these records are of special value because they come from old pagan priests who have never been in the least affected by missionary work or by contact with the whites, but who were the repositories of the most ancient tradi-
r 1
tions of their race, of which these songs are an essential part. It
' ' should also be mentioned that I have a limited acquaintance with
'. Eskimo songs ; and it goes without saying that careful comparison
'• has been made with old-world folk-songs, especially the numerous
Magyar and Slavic, and such Arabic, Turkish, Malay, Chinese, Japanese, and other songs as I could obtain. Altogether I have studied many hundreds of aboriginal American songs, of many different tribes and linguistic stocks, ranging from the Arctic ocean to Central America and from the Atlantic to the Pacific, enough, I am confident, to warrant general conclusions as to the V laws which determine the forms of our aboriginal melodies.
I say laws, for I assume that the forms taken on by primitive
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