AMERICAN ASPECTS OF ANTHROPOLOGY. 167 



such districts as the Taos Valley have come within reach by the rail- 

 roads 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 pre- 

 mature in the present state of information to decide whether Mr. J. L. 

 Morgan, in his work on the " Houses and PIouse-Life of the American 

 Aborigines," has realized the conditions of the problem. It is plausi- 

 ble 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 Zunis of New Mexico. Morgan 

 was so much a man of genius, that his speculations, even when at vari- 

 ance 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 Cen- 

 tral 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 imple- 

 ments and ornaments found among them, are brought into comparison 

 with those of other tribes of the country, they have settled into rep- 

 resentatives 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 an- 

 thropology 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. Natu- 

 rally, 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 ani- 

 mistic 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 con- 

 sidered 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 sonl. No 

 one ever found this primitive conception in more perfect form than 

 Father Lallemant, who describes, in the "Relations des Jesuites" 



