TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. b»09 



and their inhabitants, drawn up by Major J. W. Powell, of the Bureau of 

 Ethnology, and Mr. Putnam, of the Peabody Museum, disclose the old communistic 

 society surviving' in modern times, in instructive comment on the philosophers who 

 are seeking to return to it. It would be premature in the present state of informa- 

 tion to decide whether Mr. J. L. Morgan, in his work on the ' Houses and House- 

 life of the American Aborigines,' has realised the conditions of the problem. It 

 is plausible to suppose with him a connection between the communal dwellings of 

 the American Indians, such as the Iroquois long-house with its many family 

 hearths, with the more solid buildings inhabited on a similar social principle 

 by tribes such as the Zunis of New Mexico. Morgan was so much a man of 

 genius, that his speculations, even when at variance with the general view of the 

 facts, are always suggestive. This is the case with his attempt to account for the 

 organisation of the Aztec state as a highly-developed Indian tribal community, and 

 even to explain the many-roomed stone palaces, as they are called, of Central 

 America, as being huge communal dwellings like those of the Pueblo Indians. I 

 will not go further into the subject here, hoping that it may be debated in the 

 Section by those far better acquainted with the evidence. I need not, for the same 

 reason, do much more than mention the mound-builders, nor enter largely on the 

 literature which has grown up about them since the publication of the works 

 of Squier and Davis. Now that the idea of their being a separate race of high 

 antiquity has died out, and their earthworks with the implements and ornaments 

 found among them are brought into comparison with those of other tribes of the 

 country, they have settled into representatives of one of the most notable stages of 

 the northward drift of culture among the indigenes of America. 



Concluding this long survey, we come to the practical question how the stimulus 

 of the present meeting may be used to promote anthropology in Canada. It is not 

 as if the work were new here, indeed some of its best evidence has been gathered 

 on this ground from the days of the French missionaries of the seventeenth century. 

 Naturally, in this part of the country, the rudimentary stages of thought then to be 

 found among the Indians have mostly disappeared. For instance, in the native 

 conceptions of souls and spirits the crudest animistic ideas were in full force. 

 Dreams were looked on as real events, and the phantom of a living or a dead man 

 seen in a dream was considered to be that man's personality and life, that is, his 

 soul. Beyond this, by logical extension of the same train of thought, every animal 

 or plant or object, inasmuch as its phantom could be seen away from its material 

 body in dreams or visions, was held to have a soul. No one ever found this primi- 

 tive conception in more perfect form than Father Lallemant, who describes in the 

 ' Relations des Jesuites ' (1626) how, when the Indians buried kettles and furs- 

 with the dead, the bodies of these things remained, but the souls of them went to 

 the dead men who used them. So Father Le Jeune describes the soids, not only 

 of men and animals, but of hatchets and kettles, crossing the water to the Great 

 Village out in the sunset. The genuineness of this idea of object-souls is proved by 

 other independent explorers finding them elsewhere in the world. Two of the 

 accounts most closely tallying with the American, come from the Rev. Dr. Mason r 

 in Birma, and the Rev. J. Williams, in Fiji. That is to say, the most characteristic 

 development of early animism belongs to the same region as the most characteristic 

 development of matriarchal society, extending from south-east Asia into Melanesia 

 and Polynesia, and North and South America. Everyone who studies the history 

 of human thought must see the value of such facts as these, and the importance of 

 gathering them up among the rude tribes who preserve them, before they pass into 

 a new stage of culture. All who have read Mr. Hale's studies on the Hiawatha 

 legend and other Indian folklore, must admit that the native traditions, with their 

 fragments of real history, and their incidental touches of native religion, ought never 

 to be left to die out unrecorded. In the Dominion, especially in its outlying districts 

 toward the Arctic region and over the Rocky Mountains, there is an enormous mass 

 of anthropological material of high value to be collected, but this collection must 

 be done within the next generation, or there will be little left to collect. The small 

 group of Canadian anthropologists, able and energetic as they are, can manage and 

 control this work, but cannot do it all themselves. What is wanted is a Canadian 



