the dancers grow tired and disappear in the gloom of the forest." 

(W. Joest, _Welt-Fahrten_, 1895, Bd. ii, p. 159.) 

The women of the New Hebrides dance, or rather sway, to and fro 

in the midst of a circle formed by the men, with whom they do not 

directly mingle. They leap, show their genital parts to the men, 

and imitate the movements of coitus. Meanwhile the men unfasten 

the _manou_ (penis-wrap) from their girdles with one hand, with 

the other imitating the action of seizing a woman, and, excited 

by the women, also go through a mock copulation. Sometimes, it is 

said, the dancers masturbate. This takes place amid plaintive 

songs, interrupted from time to time by loud cries and howls. 

(_Untrodden Fields of Anthropology_, by a French army-surgeon, 

1898, vol. ii, p. 341.) 

Among the hill tribes of the Central Indian Hills may be traced a 

desire to secure communion with the spirit of fertility embodied 

in vegetation. This appears, for instance, in a tree-dance, which 

is carried out on a date associated not only with the growths of 

the crops or with harvest, but also with the seasonal period for 

marriage and the annual Saturnalia. (W. Crooke, "The Hill 

Tribes," _Journal of the Anthropological Institute_, new series, 

vol. i, 1899, p. 243.) The association of dancing with seasonal 

ritual festivals of a generative character--of which the above is 

a fairly typical instance--leads us to another aspect of these 

phenomena on which I have elsewhere touched in these _Studies_ 

(vol. i) when discussing the "Phenomena of Periodicity." 

The Tahitians, when first discovered by Europeans, appear to have 

been highly civilized on the sexual side and very licentious. Yet 

even at Tahiti, when visited by Cook, the strict primitive 

relationship between dancing and courtship still remained 

traceable. Cook found "a dance called Timorodee, which is 

performed by young girls, whenever eight or ten of them can be 

collected together, consisting of motions and gestures beyond 

imagination wanton, in the practice of which they are brought up 

from their earliest childhood, accompanied by words which, if it 

were possible, would more explicitly convey the same ideas. But 

the practice which is allowed to the virgin is prohibited to the 

woman from the moment that she has put these hopeful lessons in 

practice and realized the symbols of the dance." He added, 

however, that among the specially privileged class of the Areoi 

these limitations were not observed, for he had heard that this 

dance was sometimes performed by them as a preliminary to sexual 

intercourse. (Hawkesworth, _An Account of the Voyages_, etc., 

1775, vol. ii, p. 54.) 

Among the Marquesans at the marriage of a woman, even of high 

rank, she lies with her head at the bridegroom's knees and all 

the male guests come in single file, singing and dancing--those 

of lower class first and the great chiefs last--and have 

connection with the woman. There are often a very large number of 

guests and the bride is sometimes so exhausted at the end that 

she has to spend several days in bed. (Tautain, "Etude sur le 

Mariage chez les Polynesiens," _L'Anthropologie_, 

November-December, 1895, p. 642.) The interesting point for us 

here is that singing and dancing are still regarded as a 

preliminary to a sexual act. It has been noted that in sexual 

matters the Polynesians, when first discovered by Europeans, had 

largely gone beyond the primitive stage, and that this applies 

also to some of their dances. Thus the _hula-hula_ dance, while 

primitive in origin, may probably be compared more to a civilized 

than to a primitive dance, since it has become divorced from real 

life. In the same way, while the sexual pantomime dance of the