ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 91 



differentiated only to this extent, that executive functions 

 are performed by chiefs and sachems, but these chiefs and 

 sachems are also members of the council. The council is 

 legislature and court. Perhaps it were better to say that 

 the council is the court whose decisions are law, and that 

 the legislative body properly has not been developed. 



In general, crimes are well defined. Procedure is formal, 

 and forms are held as of such importance that error therein 

 is prima facie evidence that the subject matter formulated 

 was false. 



When one gens charges crime against a member of 

 another, it can of its own motion proceed only to retaliation. 

 To prevent retaliation, the gens of the offender must take 

 the necessary steps to disprove the crime, or to compound 

 or punish it. The. charge once made is held as just and 

 true until it has been disproved, and in trial the cause of 

 the defendant is first stated. The anger of the prosecuting 

 gens must be placated. 



In the tribal governments there are many institutions, 

 customs, and traditions which give evidence of a former 

 condition in which society was based, not upon kinship, but 

 upon marriage. 



From a survey of the facts it seems highly probable that 

 kinship society, as it exists among the tribes of North 

 America, has developed from connubial society, which is 

 discovered elsewhere on the globe. In fact, there are a few 

 tribes that seem scarcely to have passed that indefinite 

 boundary between the two social states. Philologic research 

 leads to the same conclusion. 



Nowhere in North America have a people been discovered 

 who have passed beyond tribal society to national society 

 based on property, i. e., that form of society which is char- 

 acteristic of civilization. Some peoples may not have reached 

 kinship society ; none have passed it. 



Nations with civilized institutions, art with palaces, mono- 

 theism as the worship of the Great Spirit, all vanish from 

 the priscan condition of North American in the light of an- 



