sque. Each dancer should have a clear mental picture of the
scene to be enacted and then give free play to bodily movements for its
expression, always keeping in rhythm with the song, so as to make sound and
motion a rhythmic unit.

THE LIFE OF THE CORN

A DRAMA IN FIVE DANCES

INTRODUCTION.--These Dances in their purport and music are taken from the
sacred rituals of the Omaha, the Osage and the Pawnee tribes. The richness
and beauty of symbolism in the original language suffer a loss of native
naivete in their English interpretation.

The American food plant known by the general term "Corn" was developed ages
ago from certain native grasses. The _Euchlaena luxurians_ found in
Guatemala is probably an ancestor of the maize. The word "maize" belongs to
the language of a people living by the Caribbean Sea and never was a
universal term for corn among the Indians of our country. The tribes to
which maize was known gave it a name derived from their own languages. So
very many centuries have passed since corn was a grass that there is no way
now of finding out when in the remote past the natives of this continent
began the task of developing from a grass a staple article of food like the
corn. The process required years of careful observation, manipulation and
culture. Not only did the Indians accomplish this task but they took the
plant from its tropical surroundings and acclimated it throughout the
region east of the Rocky Mountains up to the country of short summers in
the North; Cartier, in 1534, found it growing where the city of Montreal
now stands.

From this hasty glance at the long history of the maize we can discern the
natural sequence of its close relation to the thought and to the life of
the Indian, and to a degree understand the love and the reverence with
which the corn was held and regarded as a gift from God. Every stage of its
growth was ceremonially observed and mentioned in rituals and songs.

Among the Omaha tribe when the time came for planting, four kernels from a
red ear of corn were given to each family by the keeper of this sacred
rite. These four red kernels were mixed with the ordinary seed corn, that
it might be vivified by them and made to yield an ample harvest. Red is the
symbolic color of life. In this ceremony is preserved a trace of the
far-away time when all the precious seed corn was in the care of priestly
keepers. The ceremony of giving out the four red kernels served to tu