Here was a literature really great-great in volume, great in its fibre. It was rich in religious feeling, rich in legend, rich in poetry and imagination and romance. But a careless civilization has swept tidal down upon it, even as upon the buffalo. We have killed off our schoolmasters without bothering to record the lesson! What is left of that great First American literature is but scattered drift, lodged here and there upon the precarious memories of the aged remnants of a disappearing people. Yet

even this is enormously worth saving. It can even yet be gathered up to full the volume of the Greek and Roman Classics. But whatever of it the United States has scholarship and sense enough to care to save, must be saved within a decade. Not only that even three years from today would be too late to begin the task with any hope of accomplishing fifty per cent, of what can now be done.

For a thousand years, the aborigine has handed on from father to son, practically without variableness or shadow of turning,

not only the Law and the Prophets, not only the folklore, but the cradle songs, the love songs, the ceremonial hymns, the war songs, the stirring chanteys they used to chorus as they worked together. And with every year they have made new songs as the spirit moved. For three centuries the Spanish pioneers of the Southwest have been similarly entailing the songs that came. with their fathers from Spain-and also building up by themselves in their wilderness another wonderful fabric of native American minstrelsy. Both peoples were natural troubadoursboth of that culture-stage in which song is the logical expression. of feeling, and improvisation an every-day gift. There were no orchestras or prima donnas to rain hireling and vicarious melody alike on the just and the unjust. When a man wanted song, he sang it himself-and got more good of it than any deputy could furnish him. Under these circumstances of self-dependence and self-sufficing, native song flourishes most characteristically. Such people sing more than we who are civilized-and more sincerely. They were wise to take their joy at first hand. Some tribes were even smart enough to do their penitence as we do our music -they appointed one vicar to fast and pray and mortify his flesh for the whole village, while they sang for themselves and for him too!

We must not think of these songs as worthy of salvation only that scientists may dissect them for ponderous monographs. They are distinctly human in their value. We need them in our pleasure. If ever there is to be a real American music, these are the rock upon which it must be founded. Even the Indian songs are many of them of great delicacy, and many of great strength. Some of the war-songs, some of the race-songs, adequately harmonized, would be as stirring as the Marseillaise. Some of the lullabies, love-songs, dream-songs, are as tender as any we know.

And of course the Spanish musical development is fully up to any other in civilization. The finest "American" or European songs have none the better, in word or air, in grace and fire and wit, of innumerable old ditties of Spanish-America, while in rhythm we are generically inferior. We need these genuine, characteristic, heart-born and heart-reaching songs to enrich our impoverished repertories-how hard up we are, we scarce realize till we analyze the sort of commercial shoddy we are producing. The majority of our music today is made to sell; the old songs were made to sing. They have that same haunting quality of "Annie Laurie," and "Nellie Gray"-but with a lilt and a patter all their own.

When, eighteen years ago, I began to realize something of all this, there was no royal road. I did learn by ear, and still retain

DOÑA ADALAIDA KAMP, OF VENTURA, Photo by C. F. L. Who has recorded sixty-four old California songs for the Society.

faithfully, a great number of these unwritten airs and wordscamping for months with Mexican sheepherders in the remote mountains of New Mexico for the purpose. But one poor and hardworking student can do little single-handed-and there was no "backing." Still, some of the songs I then acquired could not now be replaced. With the beginnings of the phonograph, such scholars as Dr. Washington Matthews, Miss Alice C. Fletcher, the lamented John Comfort Fillmore, and minor others, applied it to such work; but they were handicapped by the backwardness of scientific interest and by the unsatisfactory medium.

Their work is invaluable, and they have done what they couldbut in any other country they would have been enabled to do

more.

Now, however, the Wizard has well-nigh perfected his machine. Reasonably portable, the Edison Home Phonograph gives highly satisfactory results in recording and in reproducing. One can carry the same machine to an Indian camp, and take their

Photo by C. F. L.

MISSES LUISA AND ROSA VILLA,
Who have given the Society some of its most beautiful records.

songs; and thence to a large auditorium and present them to a thousand people.

Furthermore, backed by a fast increasing public interest and by the authority of that Dean of our scientific bodies, the Archaeological Institute of America; with the devoted assistance of a little corps of experts-and, no less important, perhaps, being in the very field where these songs are, instead of having to send costly expeditions for them-the Southwest Society confidently expects to compass the fullest, the most reasoned and the most interesting collection of folk-songs ever made anywhere. It will be its fault if it fails in this aim.