4 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
its theoretical constitution and practical workings can be investigated more 
successfully than in the historical gentes of the Greeks and Romans. In 
fact, to understand fully the gentes of the latter nations a knowledge of the 
functions and of the rights, privileges, and obligations of the members of 
the American Indian gens is imperatively necessary. 
In American ethnography tribe and clan have been used in the place 
of gens as equivalent terms from not perceiving the universality of the 
latter. In previous works, and following my predecessors, I have so used 
them. A comparison of the Indian clan with the gens of the Greeks and 
Romans reveals at once their identity in structure and functions. It also 
‘extends to the phratry and tribe. If the identity of these several organiza- 
tions can be shown, of which there can be no doubt, there is a manifest 
propriety in returning to the Latin and Grecian terminologies, which are 
full and precise as well as historical. 
The plan of government of the American aborigines commenced with 
the gens and ended with the confederacy, the latter being the highest point 
to which their governmental institutions attained. It gave for the organic 
series: first, the gens, a body of consanguinei having a common gentile 
name ; second, the phratry, an assemblage of related gentes united in a 
higher association for certain common objects; third, the tribe, an assem- 
blage of gentes, usually organized in phratries, all the members of which 
spoke the same dialect; and fourth, a confederacy of tribes, the members 
of which respectively spoke dialects of the same stock language. It 
resulted in a gentile society (societas) as distinguished from a_ political 
society or state (civitas). The difference between the two is wide and fun- 
damental. There was neither a political society, nor a citizen, nor a state, 
nor any civilization in America when it was discovered. One entire ethnical 
period intervened between the highest American Indian tribes and the 
beginning of civilization, as that term is properly understood. 
The gens, though a very ancient social organization founded upon kin, 
does not include all the descendants of a common ancestor. It was for the 
reason that when the gens came in marriage between single pairs was 
unknown, and descent through males could not be traced with certainty. 
Kindred were linked together chiefly through the bond of their maternity, 
