392 The Smithsonian Institution 



and demotic development of the people were brought about 

 through intermarriage, partly spontaneous, partly regulated 

 by common law, and sometimes adopted by leaders to termi- 

 nate intertribal strife. ^ 



The idea of property right was inchoate among the 

 American aborigines, though moderately developed among 

 the cultured people of the tropics and still clearer among 

 some of the tribes in the Arctic, the natural home of thrift ; 

 and the many stages in development exemplified among the 

 tribes have offered opportunity for making much progress 

 toward elucidating the natural history of property right. 

 The subject was extensively treated by Director Powell, with 

 primitive law and marriage customs, in several early reports. 



The initial researches showed that the distinction between 

 opinions and beliefs among the Indians is vague, and does 

 not agree with that found among cultured peoples. As the 

 work progressed it was ascertained that the Indian philoso- 

 phy and belief are fundamentally mystical. Among many 

 tribes objects are vaguely supposed to have mysterious 

 doubles in a vague ideal counterpart of the actual world, and 

 the unknown is invested with shadowy and illimitable po- 

 tency; and all of the Indians so far investigated carefully 

 have been found to be mystics. The all-pervading "mys- 

 tery" of Indian belief is hardly susceptible of definite trans- 

 lation into civilized language, since the concept pertains to 

 the prescriptorial stage of thought. Several stages in the 

 development of the primitive belief have been discovered 

 and subjected to comparative study, chiefly by Powell, and 

 thereby light has been thrown on the natural history of so- 

 phiology. The earliest clearly defined stage is that in which 

 mysterious potencies are imputed to all objects, inanimate 



1 "Tribal Marriage Law," in Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1884, 



pages Ivi-lxii. 



