ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 29 



of government, and that they have not domesticated animals. 

 From this statement I must except certain tribes of Mexico and 

 Central America, whose exact state of culture has not yet been 

 clearly discovered. The criticism of the eminent author from whom 

 our Secretary has read therefore falls to the ground. 



Mr. Ward said he had looked up the exact meaning of nomadism 

 under the impression that the term implied the state given by Major 

 Powell. He had seen it used in the sense of a headless race, with 

 no form of government, no arts, no domestic animals, therefore 

 representing the lowest form of culture. The term was used in this 

 sense by Mr. Herbert Spencer. There was some justification for the 

 use of the term in this sense by European ethnologists. The mean- 

 ing of the word does not involve domestic animals ; it simply means 

 to wander. 



Prof. Mason said that the Cherokees might have been mound- 

 builders, but the mound-builders were not all Cherokees. We can- 

 not yet affirm that the ancestors of our modern Indians were the 

 mound-builders of the Mississippi valley. He called attention to 

 the fact that Dr. Brinton states that the mound-builders of the Mis- 

 sippi valley were Choctaws, He also spoke of the delicate and 

 strange forms of objects in stone found in Ohio mounds and in 

 immense stone graves compared with forms of articles made by 

 modern Indians. There are many types of these mound-objects 

 for which we have no names, because modern savages use nothing 

 like them. 



Major Powell said there is no whit of evidence to show that the 

 mounds were built by a pre-Indian people. For a long time it has 

 been assumed that a great race of people inhabited the valley of the 

 Mississippi anterior to its occupation by the tribes of Indians dis- 

 covered by early European explorers, and it was claimed that these 

 people had erected great earthworks of such magnitude that they 

 could not be attributed to the Indian tribes, but that they must have 

 been the work of people more highly organized. This error arose 

 from the fact that early writers had no adequate conception of the 

 character of tribal organization, and that kinship society is as 

 thoroughly bound together, and perhaps more thoroughly, than 

 that based upon any other plan. They also assumed that the works 

 of art found in these mounds, or associated therewith, gave evidence 

 of superior art. A careful examination of this theory has proved 

 its fallacy. On the other hand, it has been discovered that the 



