436 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



Professor M. E. Chevreul was also elected a Foreign Honor- 

 ary Member in Class I. Section 3. 



Five Iiunclrcd and ninety-first Meeting. 



February 11, 1868. — Monthly Meeting. 



The President in the chair. 



The following paper was presented and read by the 

 author : — 



A Conjectural Solution of the Origin of the Classificatory 

 Spstem of Relationship. 



By Lewis H. Morgan, 



Of Rochester, New York. 



About twenty years ago I found among tlie Iroquois Indians of 

 New York a system of relationship, for the designation and classifica- 

 tion of kindred, both unique and extraordinary in its character, and 

 wholly unlike any with which we are familiar. At the time I sup- 

 posed it was a scheme devised by themselves, and confined to this 

 particular stock of the American aborigines. Afterwards, in 1857, I 

 had occasion to re-examine the subject, when the idea of its possible 

 prevalence among other Indian nations suggested itself, together w^ith 

 its uses, in that event, for ethnological purposes. In the following 

 summer I obtained the system of the Ojibwa Indians, of Lake Supe- 

 rior ; and, although prepared in some measure for the result, it was 

 with some degree of surprise that I found among them the same elab- 

 orate and complicated system which then existed among the Iroquois. 

 Every term of relationship was radically different from the correspond- 

 ing terra in the Iroquois ; but the classification of kindred was the same. 

 It was manifest that the two systems were identical in their radical 

 characteristics. It seemed probable, also, that both were derived from 

 a common source, since it was not supposable that two peoples, although 

 speaking dialects of stock-languages, as widely separated as the Al- 

 gonkin and Iroquois, could simultaneously have invented the same 

 system, or derived it by bon-owing one from the other. 



From this fact of identity, several inferences at once presented 



