rican Ethnological
Society, published in the first volume of its "Transactions" an essay
which recognized the danger of trusting the Spanish narratives without
very careful and critical scrutiny.[104] It is to be observed that Mr.
Gallatin approached the subject with somewhat more knowledge of
aboriginal life in America than had been possessed by previous writers.
A similar scepticism was expressed by Lewis Cass, who also knew a great
deal about Indians.[105] Next came Mr. Morgan,[106] the man of
path-breaking ideas, whose minute and profound acquaintance with Indian
life was joined with a power of penetrating the hidden implications of
facts so keen and so sure as to amount to genius. Mr. Morgan saw the
nature of the delusion under which the Spaniards laboured; he saw that
what they mistook for feudal castles owned by great lords, and inhabited
by dependent retainers, were really huge communal houses, owned and
inhabited by clans, or rather by segments of overgrown clans. He saw
this so vividly that it betrayed him now and then into a somewhat
impatient and dogmatic manner of statement; but that was a slight fault,
for what he saw was not the outcome of dreamy speculation but of
scientific insight. His researches, which reduced "Montezuma's empire"
to a confederacy of tribes dwelling in pueblos, governed by a council of
chiefs, and collecting tribute from neighbouring pueblos, have been
fully sustained by subsequent investigation.

[Footnote 103: Robertson's _History of America_, 9th ed. vol.
iii. pp. 274, 281.]

[Footnote 104: "Notes on the Semi-civilized Nations of Mexico,
Yucatan, and Central America," _American Ethnological Society's
Transactions_, vol. i., New York, 1852. There is a brief
account of Mr. Gallatin's pioneer work in American philology
and ethnology in Stevens's _Albert Gallatin_, pp. 386-396.]

[Footnote 105: Cass, "Aboriginal Structures," _North Amer.
Review_, Oct., 1840.]

[Footnote 106: Mr. R. A. Wilson's _New History of the Conquest
of Mexico_, Philadelphia, 1859, denounced the Spanish
conquerors as wholesale liars, but as his book was ignorant,
uncritical, and full of wild fancies, it produced little
effect. It was demolished, with neatness and despatch, in two
articles in the _Atlantic Monthly_, April and May, 1859, by the
eminent historian John Fos