Other animals which cannot sing like the birds yet use their voices in courtship. The frogs and toads are no mean performers in this way, whilst cats, deer, and other large animals are "singers," of a kind, when stirred by mate-hunger. The monkeys chatter and make various vocal sounds, but the gibbons and man-like apes produce excessively loud and penetrating cries. These cries, though sometimes of fine note and repeated rhythmically (as in the gibbons and chimpanzees), have not the character of song. The beginnings of song in mankind are lost in the mist of ages. The Australian black-fellows chant and dance with rhythmic precision and a certain kind of melancholy cadence, but they never attempt to fascinate the other sex by the use of the voice (nor, so far as is known, in any other way), and, indeed, there is a vast interval between their vocal performances and the love-songs of modern civilized races. Man has not inherited singing from his animal ancestry, but has re-invented it for himself. His real knowledge and command of "music" is actually a novelty which has sprung into existence within the last few hundred years.
There is no doubt that animals of the same species are attracted to one another by smell, and that distinct species have distinct smells. Further, there is no doubt that in many cases the special smell of either sex attracts the other. But modern man has so nearly lost the sense of smell--why it is difficult to say, excepting that it is because it was not of life-saving value to him--that it is very difficult for us to estimate properly the significance of perfumes and odours. We know that the dog has what to us seems a marvellous power of tracking and recognizing by smell, and that other animals appear to be similarly endowed, though most usually we cannot perceive the smell at all which they recognize and follow. It appears that nearly all the hairy quadrupeds have distinctive odours, which they and their companions can readily recognize, secreted by certain glands in the skin placed here and there on the body, often on the legs and toes. Some of these odours, like musk and civet, we can perceive, though most have no effect on us. It seems to be an evidence of the absence of any need for man to produce "perfumes" by the action of his own structure that he has a feeble sense of smell and has so little perception of any perfumes or odours peculiar to himself that he has when civilized always made use of odorous substances (perfumes and scents) extracted from other animals and from plants for the purpose, before the days of cleanliness, of masking the unpleasant odours of putrescence pervading his body and clothing. Later, when dirt became less common, he made use of perfumes for the purpose of giving an agreeable whiff to the olfactory organs of his associates.