which
can serve in its stead as a designation of the enormous interval which
begins with the invention of pottery and ends with the invention of the
alphabet. The popular usage of the word is likely to become more
definite as it comes to be more generally realized how prodigious that
interval has been. When we think what a considerable portion of man's
past existence has been comprised within it, and what a marvellous
transformation in human knowledge and human faculty has been gradually
wrought between its beginning and its end, the period of barbarism
becomes invested with most thrilling interest, and its name ceases to
appear otherwise than respectable. It is Mr. Morgan's chief title to
fame that he has so thoroughly explored this period and described its
features with such masterly skill.

[Sidenote: The status of barbarism is most completely exemplified in
ancient America.]

[Sidenote: Survivals of bygone epochs of culture.]

It is worth while to observe that Mr. Morgan's view of the successive
stages of culture is one which could not well have been marked out in
all its parts except by a student of American archaeology. Aboriginal
America is the richest field in the world for the study of barbarism.
Its people present every gradation in social life during three ethnical
periods--the upper period of savagery and the lower and middle periods
of barbarism--so that the process of development may be most
systematically and instructively studied. Until we have become familiar
with ancient American society, and so long as our view is confined to
the phases of progress in the Old World, the demarcation between
civilized and uncivilized life seems too abrupt and sudden; we do not
get a correct measure of it. The oldest European tradition reaches back
only through the upper period of barbarism.[31] The middle and lower
periods have lapsed into utter oblivion, and it is only modern
archaeological research that is beginning to recover the traces of them.
But among the red men of America the social life of ages more remote
than that of the lake villages of Switzerland is in many particulars
preserved for us to-day, and when we study it we begin to realize as
never before the continuity of human development, its enormous duration,
and the almost infinite accumulation of slow efforts by which progress
has been achieved. Ancient America is further instructive in presenting
the middle status of barbarism in a different form fro