cunning from their large brains, the mammals rose easily to leadership over all other creatures.

Like the reptiles before them, the mammals filled every realm during the Cenozoic era. Herds of grasseaters thundered over the plains, meat-eaters stalked in the forests, bats hunted in the air, whales, seals and porpoises plundered in the sea. Hair and blubber covered their bodies to keep their blood warm and their energies active. The hazardous old-fashioned habit of egg-laying was abandoned for direct birth and care of the young. Their brains grew larger. But when they had mastered all environments, Nature again changed her mind. Just as mammals had grown from the race they had displaced, so from mammals came man.

22

The power of his mind and spirit has placed man on the highest summit of organic evolution. With the characteristic modesty of great rulers, he whispers praises into his own ear. But his point of view is biased, and oysters may hold different opinions. After all, man may not be as secure as he thinks he is. His body is weak and may some day be his undoing. Many of his organs, such as the vermiform appendix, have outlived their usefulness. He is slowly losing his toes, his teeth and his hair. His hearing, smell and sight are growing less acute, because his life no longer depends on them. His hands have lost their adaptability in an age of machinery. Even his mind has not improved noticeably in two thousand years of intensive cultivation. Perhaps Nature is again tiring of her favorite and preparing a new deal.

It is not likely that man himself will give rise to a higher race. A study of past life shows that advances have always come from the ranks of the undistinguished. A simple, generalized amphibian sired the first reptile; a relatively inconspicuous reptile gave birth to the earliest mammal. Specialized types are held in the rut of their specialty. They have lost their plasticity and cannot make any extreme change. Yet it is difficult to admit the probability of the emergence of a higher race from any existing animal. Man conquered the world with his intellect, and no other creature can approach him in this capacity. But Tyrannosaurus conquered the world with brawn. The pitiful little mammals beneath his feet were likewise beneath his consideration. Yet they took his glory.

Life carries on. Uncertain as are the destinies of individual and race, the spark that fires the flesh will not flicker out. Life will go struggling on with restless vigor until the earth grows very hot or very cold, until she loses her atmosphere or collides with a star. Always in the shadow of the great are creatures who remain unchanged while æons roll over their heads. They are the conservative, unambitious ones who only stand and wait. Perhaps some day they will have their chance. The insects have waited long; their fecundity may some day win. But much can be hoped for the animal who, despite grave weaknesses, rules as no creature has ruled before. With intelligence in his head, faith in his heart, and a smile on his lips, he may be able to outwit fickle Nature herself.

L

OOKED at impartially, the proper study of mankind, in these significant, searching times, is not so much man as the American.

By all accounts, this puzzling person tends more and more to the baffling and mysterious. The world has long made note of some of his phenomena and spoken of them without enthusiasm. How, for example, whenever it had with confidence classified him as harder than nails, relentless as a grappling-hook, colder than a glacier, he has suddenly stood forth with some strange great generosity for far-away victims of earthquake, plague or famine. How when it had perceived clearly that he cared for nothing on earth but a frenetic pursuit of trade and profits, he belied himself with some exhibition of quixotic or unreasonable emotion. How when his unkempt cities and disordered affairs had been savagely denounced by some judicious alien, he took his critic lovingly to his bosom and purchased great quantities of the denunciation, done into book or lecture. How he seemed to the onlooker at times about half Pistol and at times more than half Shylock; and then how, whenever the world, bemused by these gyrations, was ready to be convinced that after all he might be good at heart, he sent

a fleet to solicit a debt or filched a country to build a canal.

To these vagaries he is now adding another. If we are to understand how, we must remember that about one phase of his complicated being, all visitors have been of one mind. He had no art. God in his wisdom had so fashioned the American that he was congenitally incapable of art. Besides, in the barren and stricken soil of a counting-house, what art would ever grow? Life in America, according to the flawless judgment of the best observers, was of such a nature that not only was art negligible now, but would be so forever

more.

Since the World War, this depressing outlook seems to have darkened. More than ever we have been immersed in the two national pursuits of money-grubbing and money-wasting. Nearly all our guests from foreign parts have been constrained to rebuke us for life led in a wild tarantella of extravagance to the strains of a jazz band and the twirlings of a million electric-light signs. The madness of much wealth, added to a notorious incapacity for the refinements of civilization, was regarded as signalling a long expected and perhaps deserved downfall.

But scarcely had this been de

termined by eminent authorities than the incomprehensible and irrational American suddenly appears before the world as incontestably the supreme achiever in one of the arts to which he was well known to be all barbarian, and that one the art most directly expressive of the noblest and purest emotions of man.

That is to say, the loftiest forms of musical composition, adequately interpreted by an adequate orchestra. Without a trace of boasting or chestpuffing, we can say this; what Europe admits about it we may set down coldly as historical and sociological fact. The American grand orchestra in the average excellence of its performances, is unequalled by an average excellence elsewhere. Truly if Uncle Shylock turns to play the rôle of Orpheus and plays it rather well, here is something to make men stare and mutter.

Not because of our exceeding great merit have we attained to this summit, but for other reasons. Indeed, in sheer numbers of grand orchestras, reasonably considered, we are not so wonderful as in some other ways-in a nation of 120,000,000 inhabitants there are fifty-one of these organizations discoursing heavenly harmony. But what goes beyond this line of great or notable groups of musicians stretched across the continent is that the interest in orchestral music is so widely spread, so evenly developed, so rapidly increasing in every part of the country, and that at present it sustains, appreciates and encourages this genuine merit of accomplishment. Even Germany, whence came originally all our orchestral inspiration, makes by comparison an inferior showing.

Many persons that have not taken the trouble to note the culturai revolution in America, will scout this as an extravagance-so hard upon us is the force of accepted tradition! Turn therefore to the records. We will take as the criterion a regularly constituted orchestra containing all the instruments needed to render competently the standard classical symphonies and played by musicians capable of interpreting such works; an orchestra, moreover, giving an ordered season of public concerts.

Of such organizations in this world, the Music Year Book for 1927-28 gives the following totals: United States, 60; Austria, 21; England, 19; Germany, 19; Paris, II; Belgium, 12; Spain, 12; Russia, 7; Holland, 6; Czechoslovakia, 5; Italy, 7; Denmark, 2; Norway, 2; Scotland, 2.

This list is not pretended to be either strictly accurate or complete, for the difficulties of gathering international facts about music are great; but it is a trustworthy indication of relative development. Errors in it are usually to the advantage of the foreign field. For example, it counts as among the grand orchestras of England the organizations maintained by broadcasting companies, the pump-room "band" of Bath, and other irregularities. One English conductor reappears as the leader of five orchestras listed as separate, another as the leader of four, another as the leader of three. Two of the most conspicuous orchestras in the kingdom, the London Symphony and the London Philharmonic, have no regular conductors. Outside of London, the English orchestra ordinarily consists of teachers and amateurs

that meet spasmodically to play together, as the old Euterpeans played in New York a century ago. An orchestra without a regular leader and without a system of concerts is not within the scope of the American conception.

But what is true of England in this respect may be found true sometimes in other European countries, even those much more highly reputed for art. In general, conditions are better on the continent, because on the continent the orchestra is a recognized and regular feature of public education and is sustained by the government, municipal or state. This assures regular and good concerts, but involves a disadvantage. Being paid by the state the musicians are paid poorly and must have other employment and earnings, a condition that almost erases the chance of adequate rehearsing. Besides, the world of music has gone much beyond Nick Bottom's day, when a man could be a weaver all the rest of the year and play on the bones and the tongs for one night. Modern orchestral music has sterner demands. Satisfying results can be had now only by intensive concentration.

Such a blissful state demands much fluid capital, and it is here that America enters with its incontestable advantage. Having a disproportionate share of the world's wealth we can do what nobody else can hope to do. Sometimes the balance on our side is strange to contemplate and sometimes it is disconcerting. The smallest salary paid to any player in the Boston Symphony Orchestra is more than twice that paid to the conductor of the Carlsbad orchestra, one of the best in Central Europe.

Of the fifty-one grand orchestras here counted in the United States, (falling, no doubt, short of the actual number) twelve are of the first rank and would be so deemed anywhere. With the exception of three orchestras on the continent of Europe, these twelve have in this world no fellows. They dot the map from ocean to ocean-Boston, New York (two-to be consolidated), Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Los Angeles; eleven cities, each the happy possessor of a magnificent orchestra and therefore of a dynamic center of musical influence and inspiration.

The glory of these is well known and a national asset. What is not well known, though at least as much of a national asset, is that in many cities and towns east and west, north and south, are orchestras of fulltoned dimensions if varying merit, with which earnest apostles of the musical gospel are tutoring millions of people for the heaven of an exalted art. Some of these, I have listed as follows: