Within recent years much aboriginal song material has been gathered, mainly in Central and Northern Australia. The scientific value of this material can be readily understood; but its artistic merit has been the subject of much controversy. The present article has been written with a view to pointing out certain features of the Australian songs—features whose appreciation may enable listeners to obtain more enjoyment from aboriginal recordings. My remarks are based on my own collection, which was gathered in Central Australia; but they are true in a general sense of most Australian songs as far as we know at present.

The Dundo Museum, in the town of that name which is the administrative certtre of the Companhia de Diamantes de Angola, in Lunda (Portuguese West Africa), was founded by that Company in 1945, based on an ethnographic collection composed already at that time of several hundreds of objects representative of the native populations of that vast district situated in the very heart of Africa.

Of all the categories of nineteenth-century secular Yiddish folk songs of East Europe, the love songs are the most numerous, popular, melodious and poetic. This fact challenged a number of writers on Jewish literature and folklore, who were not able to account for this type of song current in a community which was patriarchal in structure and strict in its religious observances.