290 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
gentes united in a band. Among the Village Indians the same thing 
repeated itself in a slightly different manner. When a village became 
overcrowded with numbers, a colony went up or down on the same stream 
and commenced a new village. Repeated at intervals of time, several such 
villages would appear, each independent of the other and a self-governing 
body, but united in a league or confederacy for mutual protection. Dia- 
lectic variation would finally spring up, and thus complete their growth 
into tribes 
The manner in which tribes are evolved from each other can be shown 
directly by examples. The fact of separation can be derived in part from 
tradition, in part from the possession by each of a number of the same 
gentes, and deduced in part from the relations of their dialects. Tribes 
formed by the subdivisions of an original tribe would possess a number of 
gentes in common, and speak dialects of the same language. After several 
centuries of separation they would still have a number of the same gentes. 
Thus the Hurons, now Wyandots, have six gentes of the same name with 
six of the gentes of the Seneca-Iroquois, after at least four hundred years 
of separation. The Potawattamies have eight gentes of the same name 
with eight among the Ojibwas, while the former have six, and the latter 
fourteen, which are different, showing that new gentes have been formed in 
each tribe by segmentation since their separation. A still older offshoot 
from the Ojibwas, or from the common parent tribe of both, the Miamis, 
have but three gentes in common with the former, namely, the Wolf, the 
Loon, and the Eagle. The minute social history of the tribes of the Gano- 
wanian family is locked up in the life and growth of the gentes._ If investi- 
gation is ever turned strongly in this direction, the gentes themselves would 
become reliable guides, in respect to the order of separation from each 
other of the tribes of the same stock. 
This process of subdivision has been operating among the American 
aborigines for thousands of years, until several hundred tribes have been 
developed from about seventy stocks as existing in as many families of 
language. 
