82 FOSSIL MEN. 



and worships in a wooden church, is not necessarily 

 less civilized than the people who built magnificent 

 stone edifices in Yucatan, though if the New England 

 village were deserted, no trace of it, except in a little 

 broken pottery, or a few hearth and chimney stones, 

 might remain in a century or two. Nations living by 

 river-sides, and whose only remains are a few inde- 

 structible flint implements, may have been, and pro- 

 bably were, more highly civilized than those whose 

 debris preserved in caves furnishes far more numerous 

 and curious antiques. Our Hochelagans were wood- 

 builders. Bark peeled from trees in wide sheets, and 

 supported on poles, forms the cheapest and most 

 comfortable abode for dwellers in the forest, and the 

 people of Hochelaga had houses of this kind with 

 several rooms, and an upper storey to be used as 

 a granary. They were, possibly, more comfortable 

 and suited to the habits of their builders than the 

 huts of mud and rough stone occupied by thousands 

 of the peasants of modern Europe. Their habitations 

 belonged to a type which seems to have been nearly 

 universal among the more settled populations of Ame- 

 rica, and which Morgan has shown to be connected with 

 peculiar customs of patriarchal communism akin to 

 those of which traces remain in the tribes and gentes 

 of early Europe and Asia. Cartier's plan of a Hoche- 

 lagan house, as given on the following page (Fig. 20), 

 shows a series of rooms surrounding a central hall, 

 in which was a ^fireplace. Now, we know from the 

 customs of the Iroquois and Hurons, as described by 



