hat book
was resumed. Fortunately it was not then carried to completion, for it
would have been sadly antiquated by this time. The revolution in theory
concerning the Aryans has been as remarkable as the revolution in
chemical theory which some years ago introduced the New Chemistry. It is
becoming eminently probable that the centre of diffusion of Aryan speech
was much nearer to Lithuania than to any part of Central Asia, and it
has for some time been quite clear that the state of society revealed in
Homer and the Vedas is not at all like primitive society, but very far
from it. By 1876 I had become convinced that there was no use in going
on without widening the field of study. The conclusions of the Aryan
school needed to be supplemented, and often seriously modified, by the
study of the barbaric world, and it soon became manifest that for the
study of barbarism there is no other field that for fruitfulness can be
compared with aboriginal America.

This is because the progress of society was much slower in the western
hemisphere than in the eastern, and in the days of Columbus and Cortes
it had nowhere "caught up" to the points reached by the Egyptians of the
Old Empire or by the builders of Mycenae and Tiryns. In aboriginal
America we therefore find states of society preserved in stages of
development similar to those of our ancestral societies in the Old World
long ages before Homer and the Vedas. Many of the social phenomena of
ancient Europe are also found in aboriginal America, but always in a
more primitive condition. The clan, phratry, and tribe among the
Iroquois help us in many respects to get back to the original
conceptions of the gens, curia, and tribe among the Romans. We can
better understand the growth of kingship of the Agamemnon type when we
have studied the less developed type in Montezuma. The house-communities
of the southern Slavs are full of interest for the student of the early
phases of social evolution, but the Mandan round-house and the Zuni
pueblo carry us much deeper into the past. Aboriginal American
institutions thus afford one of the richest fields in the world for the
application of the comparative method, and the red Indian, viewed in
this light, becomes one of the most interesting of men; for in studying
him intelligently, one gets down into the stone age of human thought. No
time should be lost in gathering whatever can be learned of his ideas
and institutions, before their characte