460 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



exhibited merely as curios of the fast disappearing aborigines. To 

 increase this collection and give it a definite value, Lewis H. Mor- 

 gan was employed to collect such material from the Indians as 

 would be of interest, and the accounts of the Morgan collection con- 

 tained in the second, third and fifth annual reports of the State 

 Cabinet are without doubt the best descriptions of confederated 

 Iroquois ethnological material of the period 1 790-1 850 extant. 



How little at first Morgan realized the scientific value of his work 

 may be known from his letter to the Regents under date of October 

 31, 1848, in which he discussed the necessity of the cabinet. 



Such a cabinet would, it is true, contain but little to instruct, 

 would seem but slightly to enlarge the bounds of human knowledge, 

 yet it would be all it pretended, — a memento to the red race who 

 preceded us. . . 



Opinion must have suddenly changed, for Mr Morgan three years 

 later, deeply impressed by his contact with the Iroquois, wrote the 

 profoundest ethnographic study of the American Indians ever pro- 

 duced up to his time, and The League of the Iroquois yet remains 

 a classic. The scientific world had awakened, ethnology as a dis- 

 tinct science was recognized, and the great work of Squier and 

 Davis, Ancient Monuments in the Mississippi Valley, demonstrated 

 that perhaps there was some real scientific value in the " mementos 

 of the red race " and that in the category of natural sciences Ameri- 

 can archeology was preeminently worthy of a place. Early in the 

 19th century, however, there was no American archeology or eth- 

 nology as we know these subjects now, and therefore there were 

 no specimens. Objects were termed relics and people interested 

 in relics were called antiquarians. The curiosities which they found 

 in the cornfield when it was plowed were puzzling wonders which 

 caused the finders to invent all sorts of wild theories as far from 

 truth as human imagination could lead. Strange ideas were formed 

 and every new discovery warped to support them. Anthropology 

 at this period took no notice of a flint chip, of a wampum belt, or 

 of a snatch of Indian folk song — it related rather to phrenology 

 and the doctrine of temperaments.^ Then the works of Morgan, of 

 Squier and Davis and of Prof, (afterward Sir) Daniel Wilson, came 

 before the world, and with those works a new epoch dawned. 



When Morgan began his third year's work for the State he seems 

 to have entered it with a new spirit, for at this time, feeling the real 



^ The term " anthropology " was first employed in 1501 by Magnus Hundt, 

 of Marburg, and referred to human anatomy. 



