accommodate several families was the rule. Moreover, they were
occupied as joint tenement houses. There was also a tendency to form
these households on the principle of gentile kin, the mothers with
their children being of the same gens or clan.

If we enter upon the great problem of Indian life with a
determination to make it intelligible, their house life and domestic
institutions must furnish the key to its explanation. These pages
are designed as a commencement of that work. It is a fruitful, and,
at present, but partially explored field. We have been singularly
inattentive to the plan of domestic life revealed by the houses of
the aboriginal period. Time and the influences of civilization have
told heavily upon their mode of life until it has become so far
modified, and in many cases entirely overthrown, that it must be
taken up as a new investigation upon the general facts which remain.
At the epoch of European discovery it was in full vitality in North
and South America; but the opportunities of studying its principles
and its results were neglected. As a scheme of life under
established institutions, it was a remarkable display of the
condition of mankind in two well marked ethnical periods, namely,
the Older Period and the Middle Period of barbarism, the first being
represented by the Iroquois and the second by the Aztecs, or ancient
Mexicans. In no part of the earth were these two conditions of human
progress so well represented as by the American Indian tribes. A
knowledge of the culture and of the state of the arts of life in
these periods is indispensable to a definite conception of the
stages of human progress. From the laws which govern this progress,
from the uniformity of their operation, and from the necessary
limitations of the principle of intelligence, we may conclude that
our own remote ancestors passed through a similar experience and