ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 27 



this Society, as to tlie comparatively recent period in which mound- 

 building was practiced, did not seem to be shared in Europe. He 

 had just received from the Marquis de Nadaillac, one of our hon- 

 orary members, and perhaps among Europeans the one person who 

 kept himself best informed on all the developments of American ar- 

 chaeology, the proof-sheets of an article in the Revue if Anthropo- 

 logie, in which he presented to European readers a resume of Mr. 

 Carr's recent work. While admitting the force of the facts set forth, 

 the Marquis dissented from the conclusions, his particular reason for 

 dissent being that the reversion to barbarism of tribes advanced in 

 civilization was a thing unknown. He said a tribe or people par- 

 tially civilized might be conquered by one more barbarous, and 

 might become merged in it ; but it had never been known that such 

 a people, after once having fixed homes, agriculture, and arts of 

 domestic life, had lost all these and fallen back to the barbarous 

 condition of their conquerors. On the contrary, experience shows 

 that the effect of such a mixture of races is to elevate the conquerors 

 by imparting to them the arts and habits of the conquered people. 



Col. Seely read brief extracts from M. de Nadaillac's article, 

 which concluded with very complimentary mention of the work of 

 American explorers and an expression of belief that they would 

 before long lead to a solution of the mystery of the mound-builders. 



Major Powell said : The criticism which Colonel Seely has read 

 for us is interesting in various respects, but it fails to be valid by reason 

 of a curious error. It is a great mistake to suppose that the Indians 

 of North America were nomads. All of our Indian tribes had fixed 

 habitations. It is true they moved their villages from time to time, 

 because of their superstitions and for other reasons, but to all intents 

 and purposes they were sedentary, living in fixed habitations from 

 year to year, though from generation to generation they might 

 change the sites of their towns. But of many of our Indian tribes 

 because partly nomadic shortly after the advent of the white man, 

 from whom they obtained horses and fire-arms. With horses they 

 could easily move from point to point, and with fire-arms they could 

 obtain a larger share of their sustentation by hunting than they 

 had previously done, and many tribes gave up agriculture on this 

 account. Instead of living in houses of wood and stone and earth 

 they came to live more or less in skin tents. 



If we attempt to mark off the progress of mankind in culture 

 into stages, that which I shall call savagery is, in a general way, 



