100 HOUSES AND HOUSE-LIFE OF THE AMERICAN ABORIGINES. 
advanced families of the Iroquois tribes. There are still upon the Iroquois 
reservations in this State many log houses or cabins with but a single room 
on the ground floor, and a loft above, with neither a table or chair in their 
scanty furniture. A portion of them still live very much in the old style, 
with perhaps two regular meals daily instead of one. That they have made 
this much of change in the course of two centuries must be accounted 
remarkable, for they have been compelled, so to speak, to jump one entire 
ethnical period, without the experience or training of so many intervening 
generations, and without the brain-growth such a change of the plan of 
domestic life implies, when reached through natural individual experience 
There is a tradition still current among the Seneca-Iroquois, if the memory 
of so recent an occurrence may be called traditional, that when the propo- 
sition that man and wife should eat together, which was so contrary to im- 
memorial usage, was first determined in the affirmative, it was formally 
agreed that man and wife should sit down together at the same dish and 
eat with the same ladle, the man eating first and then the woman, and so 
alternately until the meal was finished. 
The testimony of such writers as have noticed the house-life of the 
Indian tribes is not uniform in respect to the number of meals aday. Thus 
Catlin remarks, “As I have before observed, these men (the Mandans) 
generally eat but twice a day, and many times not more than once, and 
these meals are light and simple The North American Indians, 
taking them in the aggregate, even when they have an abundance to sub- 
sist on, eat less than any civilized population of equal numbers that I have 
ever travelled among.”! 
And Heckewelder, speaking of the Delawares and 
other tribes, says: “They commonly make two meals every day, which they 
say is enough. If any one should feel hungry between meal-times, there 
is generally something in the house ready for him.’ Adair contents himself 
with stating of the Chocta and Cherokee tribes that ‘‘they have no stated 
meal time.” There was doubtless some variation in different localities, and 
even in the same household; but as a general rule, from what is known of 
1 North American Indians, Philadelphia ed., 1857, i, 203. 
2 Indian Nations, 193. 
3 History of the American Indian, Lond. ed., 1775, p. 17. 
