m that which it
assumed in the eastern hemisphere. Its most conspicuous outward
manifestations, instead of tents and herds, were strange and imposing
edifices of stone, so that it was quite natural that observers
interpreting it from a basis of European experience should mistake it
for civilization. Certain aspects of that middle period may be studied
to-day in New Mexico and Arizona, as phases of the older periods may
still be found among the wilder tribes, even after all the contact they
have had with white men. These survivals from antiquity will not
permanently outlive that contact, and it is important that no time
should be lost in gathering and putting on record all that can be
learned of the speech and arts, the customs and beliefs, everything that
goes to constitute the philology and anthropology of the red men. For
the intelligent and vigorous work of this sort now conducted by the
Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, under the direction
of Major Powell, no praise can be too strong and no encouragement too
hearty.

[Footnote 31: Now and then, perhaps, but very rarely, it just
touches the close of the middle period, as, e. g., in the lines
from Hesiod and Lucretius above quoted.]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Tribal society and multiplicity of languages in aboriginal
America.]

A brief enumeration of the principal groups of Indians will be helpful
in enabling us to comprehend the social condition of ancient America.
The groups are in great part defined by differences of language, which
are perhaps a better criterion of racial affinity in the New World than
in the Old, because there seems to have been little or nothing of that
peculiar kind of conquest with incorporation resulting in complete
change of speech which we sometimes find in the Old World; as, for
example, when we see the Celto-Iberian population of Spain and the
Belgic, Celtic, and Aquitanian populations of Gaul forgetting their
native tongues, and adopting that of a confederacy of tribes in Latium.
Except in the case of Peru there is no indication that anything of this
sort went on, or that there was anything even superficially analogous to
"empire," in ancient America. What strikes one most forcibly at first is
the vast number of American languages. Adelung, in his "Mithridates,"
put the number at 1,264, and Ludewig, in his "Literature of the American
Languages," put it roundly a