Musical instruments seem to have had a multiple origin. The ram's horn of the early Briton and the perforated conch-shell of the South Sea Islander are natural trumpets; when they were copied in brass and other metals they evolved rapidly to become the varied wind instruments typified to-day by the cornet and the tuba. In the same way the reed of the Greek shepherd is the ancestor of the flute and clarionet. Stringed instruments like the guitar, zither, and violin form another class which begins with the bow and its twanging string. The power of the note was intensified by holding a gourd against the bow to serve as a resonance-chamber. When the musician of early times enlarged this chamber, moved it to the end of the bow, and multiplied the strings, he constructed the cithara of antiquity,--the ancestor of a host of modern types, from the harp to the bass-viol and mandolin.
The dance and the drama find their beginnings in the simple reënactment of an actual series of events. Among Polynesians of to-day the dances still retain the rhythmic beat of the war-tread measure, and many of the motions of the arms are more or less conventionalized imitations of the act of striking with a club, or hurling a spear, and other acts. To such elements many other things have been added, but the fact remains that our own formal dances, as well as the sun-dance of the Indian and the mad whirl of the Dervish, are modern products which have truly evolved.
When we turn to science and philosophy and other intellectual attainments of modern civilized peoples, it is easier to see how evolution has been accomplished, because we possess a wealth of written literature which explains the way that human ideas have changed from century to century. In these cases there can be no question that such evidences provide accurate instruments for estimating the mental abilities of the writers who produced them. We shall take up the higher conceptions of mankind at a later juncture, so at this point we need only to note that even these mental possessions, like household culture and even the physical structures of a human body, have changed and differentiated to become the widely different interpretations of the world and supernature that are held by the civilized, barbarous, and savage races of to-day.