MORGAN.] INDIAN SOCIETY UNLIKE EUROPEAN. 225 
in all the stages of advancement indicated by three great ethnical periods, 
namely the Status of savagery, the Lower Status of barbarism, and the 
Middle Status of barbarism,’ more persons ought to be found willing to 
work upon this material for the credit of American scholarship. It will be 
necessary for them to do as Herodotus did in Asia and Africa, to visit the 
native tribes at their villages and encampments, and study their institutions 
as living organisms, their condition, and their plan of lite. When this has 
been done from the region of the Arctic Sea to Patagonia, Indian society 
will become intelligible, because its structure and principles will be under- 
stood. It exhibits three distinct phases, each with a culture peculiar to 
-itself, lying back of civilization, and back of the Upper Status of barbar- 
ism, having very little in common with European society of three hundred 
years ago, and very little in common with American society of to-day. Its 
institutions, inventions, and customs find no analogues in those of civilized 
nations, and cannot be explained in terms adapted to such a society. Our 
later investigators are doing their work more and more on the plan of direct 
visitation, and I make no doubt a science of American ethnology will yet 
come into existence among us and rise high in public estimation from the 
important results it will rapidly achieve. Precisely what is now needed is 
the ascertainment and scientific treatment of this material. 
After so general a condemnation of Spanish and American writers, so 
far as they represent Aztec society and government, some facts and some 
reasons ought to be presented to justify the charge. Recognizing the obli- 
gation, I propose to question the credibility of so much of the second vol- 
ume of ‘‘The Native Races” and of so much of other Spanish histories as 
relate to two subjects—the character of the house in which Montezuma 
resided, which is styled a palace; and the account of the celebrated dinner 
of Montezuma, which is represented as the daily banquet of an imperial 
potentate. Neither subject, considered in itself, is of much importance ; 
but if the accounts in these two particulars are found to be fictitious and 
delusive, a breach will be made in a vital section of the fabric of Aztec 
romance, now the most deadly encumbrance upon American ethnology. 
1See ante, page 43, note, for a definition of proposed ethnical or culture periods, and Ancient 
Society, chapter 1, ‘‘ Ethnical Periods,” 
15 
