14 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
acceptance or rejection. If the nomination made was accepted by both it 
became complete, but if either refused it was thereby set aside and a new 
election was made by the gens. When the choice made by the gens had 
been accepted by the phratries it was still necessary, as before stated, that 
the new sachem, or the new chief, should be invested by the council of the 
confederacy, which alone had power to invest with office. 
The phratry was without governmental functions in the strict sense of 
the phrase, these being confined to the gens tribe.and confederacy; but it 
entered into their social affairs with large administrative powers, and would 
have concerned itself more and more with their religious affairs as the con- 
dition of the people advanced. Unlike the Grecian phratry and the Roman 
curia, it had no official head. There was no chief of the phratry as such, 
and no religious functionaries belonging to it as distinguished from the gens 
and tribe. The phratric institution among the Iroquois was in its rudi- 
mentary archaic form; but it grew into life by natural and inevitable devel- 
opment, and remained permanent because it met necessary wants. Every 
institution of mankind which attained permanence will be found linked 
with a perpetual want. With the gens tribe and confederacy in existence 
the presence of the phratry was substantially assured. It required time, 
however, and further experience to manifest all the uses to which it might 
be made subservient. 
Among the Village Indians of Mexico and Central America the phratry 
must have existed, reasoning upon general principles, and have been a more 
fully developed and influential organization than among the Iroquois. Un- 
fortunately mere glimpses at such an institution are all that can be found in 
the teeming narratives of the Spanish writers within the first century after 
the Spanish conquest. The four “lineages” of the Tlascalans who occu- 
pied the four quarters of the pueblo of Tlascala were, in all probability, so 
many phratries. They were sufticiently numerous for four tribes, but as 
they occupied the same pueblo and spoke the same dialect the phratric 
organization was apparently a necessity. Each lineage or phratry, so to 
call it, had a distinct military organization, a peculiar costume and banner, 
and its head war-chief (Zeuctli), who was its general military commander. 
They went forth to battle by phratries. The organization of a military 
