to a gallery of ancient and
medieval paintings clearly shows that the conventional modes of clothing
the human body have changed from century to century, while it is equally
plain that they alter even from year to year of the present time,
according to the vagaries of fashion.

A brief review of the "arts of pleasure," including music and sculpture
and painting, demonstrates their evolution also. The earliest cavemen of
Europe left crude drawings of reindeer and bears and wild oxen scratched
upon bits of ivory or upon the stone walls of their shelters; the painting
and sculpture of early historic Europe were more advanced, but they were
far from being what Greece and Rome produced in later centuries. Indeed,
the evolution of Greek sculpture carried this higher art to a point that
is generally conceded to be far beyond that attained by even our modern
sculptors, just as flying reptiles of the Chalk Age developed wings and
learned to fly long before birds and bats came into existence.

In the field of music, the earliest stages can be surmised only by a study
of the actual songs and instruments of primitive peoples now living in
wild places. No doubt the song began as a recitation by a savage of the
events of a battle or a journey in which he had participated. In giving
such a description he lives his battles again, and his simulated moods and
passions alter his voice so that the spoken history becomes a chant. From
this to the choral and oratorio is not very far.

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 reenactment of
an actua