has remarked that "among many of the lowest races the only love-dances
in vogue are those performed by the women" (545a. 4069). And Letourneau
considers that "there are good grounds for supposing that women may have
especially participated in the creation of the lyric of the erotic
kind." Professor Mason, in the course of his remarks upon woman's labour
in the world in all ages, says (112. 12):--

"The idea of a _maker_, or creator-of-all-things found no congenial
soil in the minds of savage men, who manufactured nothing. But, as the
first potters, weavers, house-builders were women, the idea of a divine
creator as a moulder, designer, and architect originated with her, or
was suggested by her. The three Fates, Clotho, who spins the thread of
life; Lachesis, who fixes its prolongation; and Atropos, who cuts this
thread with remorseless shears, are necessarily derived from woman's
work. The mother-goddess of all peoples, culminating in the apotheosis
of the Virgin Mary, is an idea, either originated by women, or devised
to satisfy their spiritual cravings."

And we have, besides the goddesses of all mythologies, personifying
woman's devotion, beauty, love. What shall we say of that art, highest
of all human accomplishments, in the exercise of which men have become
almost as gods? The old Greeks called the singer [Greek: poiaetaes],
"maker," and perhaps from woman the first poets learned how to worship
in noble fashion that great _maker_ of all, whose poem is the
universe. Religion and poetry have ever gone hand in hand; Plato was
right when he said: "I am persuaded, somehow, that good poets are the
inspired interpreters of the gods." Of song, as of religion, it may
perhaps be said: _Dux foemina facti_.

To the mother beside the cradle where lies her tender offspring, song is