Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/179

Rh such districts as the Taos Valley have come within reach by the railroads across to the Pacific. The accounts of these village-forts and their inhabitants, drawn up by Major J. W. Powell, of the Bureau of Ethnology, and Mr. Putnam, of the Peabody Museum, disclose the old communistic society surviving in modern times, in instructive comment on the philosophers who are seeking to return to it. It would be premature in the present state of information to decide whether Mr. J. L. Morgan, in his work on the "Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines," has realized the conditions of the problem. It is plausible to suppose with him a connection between the communal dwellings of the American Indians, such as the Iroquois long-house with its many family hearths, with the more solid buildings inhabited on a similar social principle by tribes such as the Zuñis of New Mexico. Morgan was so much a man of genius, that his speculations, even when at variance with the general view of the facts, are always suggestive. This is the case with his attempt to account for the organization of the Aztec state as a highly developed Indian tribal community, and even to explain the many-roomed stone palaces, as they are called, of Central America, as being huge communal dwellings like those of the Pueblo Indians. I will not go further into the subject here, hoping that it may be debated in the section by those far better acquainted with the evidence. I need not, for the same reason, do much more than mention the mound-builders, nor enter largely on the literature which has grown up about them since the publication of the works of Squier and Davis. Now that the idea of their being a separate race of high antiquity has died out, and their earthworks, with the implements and ornaments found among them, are brought into comparison with those of other tribes of the country, they have settled into representatives of one of the most notable stages of the northward drift of culture among the indigenes of America.

Concluding this long survey, we come to the practical question how the stimulus of the present meeting may be used to promote anthropology in Canada. It is not as if the work were new here; indeed, some of its best evidence has been gathered on this ground from the days of the French missionaries of the seventeenth century. Naturally, in this part of the country, the rudimentary stages of thought then to be found among the Indians have mostly disappeared. For instance, in the native conceptions of souls and spirits the crudest animistic ideas were in full force. Dreams were looked on as real events, and the phantom of a living or a dead man seen in a dream was considered to be that man's personality and life, that is, his soul. Beyond this, by logical extension of the same train of thought, every animal or plant or object, inasmuch as its phantom could be seen away from its material body in dreams or visions, was held to have a soul. No one ever found this primitive conception in more perfect form than Father Lallemant, who describes, in the "Rélations des Jesuites"