Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 2).djvu/360

346 APPENDIX C.

MR. LEWIS MORGAN AND THE AZTECS.

"When we beheld so many cities and towns builded in the lake; and, on dry land, other great cities and that causeway, so fairly levelled, leading straight to Mexico, we stood gazing in amazement. We said that this fair spectacle, with the tall towers, the temples, and the buildings all of stone rising from the water, was like the cities of enchantment in 'Amadis de Gaule!' "

Thus does Bernal Diaz, one of the companions of Cortes, describe the most romantic moment in human history—the approach of the European invaders to the great centre of the Aztec civilisation.

The late Mr. Lewis Morgan, in his celebrated article "The Dinner of Montezuma," attempted to show that Bernal Diaz's report was nearly as fabulous as "Amadis de Gaule." He maintained that the Aztecs were but a confederacy of "pueblo Indians," and that their civilisation was but a stage above that of the contemporary Iroquois. This astonishing theory does not seem to have been examined in England; and people appear to take it for granted that Mr. Morgan, who had not been in early Mexico, knew the place better than Cortes and Bernal Diaz, who actually visited it—a kind of cleverness satirised by the Delphian Oracle when it was displayed by the first colonists of Cyrene.


 * Herodot. iv. 157.

Mr. Morgan did very considerable services to ethnology. He was an affiliated Iroquois; he knew that people well; he described their institutions excellently; he also discovered the wide prevalence of the "classificatory system" of reckoning kindred, or, at least, the system of addressing kinsfolk.