476 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
years or so B.C., of the first civilizations of Mesopotamia, and concern- 
ing which the mere spread of such a civilization to the American 
continent and its development here indicates another interesting 
hurdle in the race course of time. I think we can lay down these 
principles in the matter:— (1) That the forms of culture in the Ameri- 
can continent constitute various waves of advent from the Old World! 
and perhaps Polynesia; (2) that they had not greatly changed in the 
New World, up to the arrival of Europeans; (3) that each pictures for 
us a whole separate age of culture derived from some once dominant 
Old World race, whose original habitat, diffusion and relative age 
might be sought by piecing the American and Asiatic portions of the 
facts together. It is obvious that the Iroquois peoples, with their 
palisaded villages, and crops of maize, beans and tobacco, possessed a 
culture of the “higher barbarian’? type which was much in advance 
of that of the wandering Algonquins and similar tribes, and yet that 
even the latter possessed institutions (such as the sweat-bath and 
fine basketry) which indicated a wave of culture that, although simple 
was still considerably beyond those of for example, the Bushmen and 
Tasmanians, and at any rate was distinctive and later. I have 
estimated that the Mohawk tribe, who were pure Hurons, and had 
come from the Island of Montreal and surrounding country, arrived 
there from the Huron country between Lakes Huron and Simcoe 
somewhere about -the year fourteen hundred. If conjecturally it 
might be said that the Hurons of that region and their relatives, the 
Tobacco Nation, the Senecas, and the Nation-of-a-Speech-a-little- 
Different, had taken, say, three or four hundred years more to develop 
their dialectic and other differences out of a common local tribe, this 
would bring us to say one thousand A.D. And if they and their more 
distant relatives the Cherokees, whose language was very much 
further removed, might be conjectured to have met in a common 
origin, let us say 500 years before—that is to say bringing us back to 
about 500 A.D.—we would have some dim notion of a relative 
chronology, admittedly incorrect, but yet illustrating the course of my 
meaning. Indian scholars differ as to the origin of the Iroquois, who 
were certainly an intrusive element from the south—probably by way 
of the west—into the.great Algonquin territory, just as the Algonquin 
peoples were at a very early day intruders into the territory of the 
Eskimo, the Athabaskans, and possibly other primitive races. 
The late Cyrus Thomas held that the Iroquoian stock was merely a 
continuation of that of the Mound Builders. But wherever they 
came from in later times, they certainly came and brought their 
1 Sir E. B. Tylor seems to still doubt this, from his article Anthropology, in the 
Encyclopedia Britannica. 
