The weapons, arts, usages, and customs, inventions, architecture, institutions, and form of government of all alike bear the impress of a common mind, and reveal, in their wide range, the successive stages of development of the same original conceptions. Our first mistake consisted in overrating the degree of advancement of the Village Indians, in comparison with that of the other tribes; our second in underrating that of the latter; from which resulted a third, that of separating one from the other, and regarding them as different races. The evidence of their unity of origin has now accumulated to such a degree as to leave no reasonable doubt upon the question. The first two classes of tribes always held the preponderating power, at least in North America, and furnished the migrating bands which replenished the ranks of the Village Indians, as well as the continent, with inhabitants. It remained for the Village Indians to invent the process of smelting iron ore to attain to the Upper Status of barbarism, and, beyond that, to invent a phonetic alphabet to reach the first stage of civilization. One entire ethnical period intervened between the highest class of Indians and the beginning of civilization.[1]
It seems singular that the Village Indians, who first became possessed of maize, the great American cereal, and of the art of cultivation, did not rise to supremacy over the continent. With their increased numbers and more stable subsistence they might have been expected to extend their
- ↑
PROPOSED ETHNIC OR CULTURE PERIODS. PERIOD OF SAVAGERY. PERIOD OF BARBARISM. Subperiods. Conditions. Subperiods. Conditions. Older Period Lower Status Older Period Lower Status Middle Period Middle Status Middle Period Middle Status Later Period Upper Status Later Period Upper Status PERIOD OF CIVILIZATION. RECAPITULATION. Older Period of Savagery. —From the infancy of the human race to the knowledge of fire and the acquisition of a fish subsistence. Middle Period. —From the acquisition of a fish subsistence to the invention of the bow and arrow. Later Period. —From the invention of the bow and arrow to the invention of the art of pottery. Older Period of Barbarism. —From a knowledge of pottery to the domestication of animals in the eastern hemisphere, and in the western to the cultivation of maize and plants by irrigation. Middle Period. —From the domestication of animals, &c., to the invention of the process of smelting iron ore. Later Period. —From the knowledge of iron to the invention of a phonetic alphabet, or to the use of hieroglyphs upon stone as an equivalent. Civilization. —From the invention of a phonetic alphabet and the use of letters in literary composition to the present time.
