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Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 72.djvu/574

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570
POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY
Lewis Henry Morgan.

N. Y., in 1818, and died in Rochester in 1881, was by profession a lawyer and man of affairs, interested in the first development of the railway system in the middle west, a member of the legislature, both house and senate. He was thus the type of man more usually found among the hereditary upper classes of Great Britain than in our industrial democracy. In view of the increasing specialization of science, there appears to be but little place for the amateur and perhaps this is not to be regretted. But those who begin as amateurs and become serious students with science for their main concern, arc selected from large numbers in accordance with interests and talent, and the threatened disappearance of such a group is a serious loss to science.

As a young man Morgan became interested in the League of the Iroquois Indians and an intimate friend of Hasa-no-dú-da, or Ely S. Parker, a Seneca Indian, later commissioner of Indian affairs. He was adopted into a clan of the Seneca nation and admitted fully to its society. His intimate knowledge resulted in the publication of a book on "The League of the Iroquois," the first scientific account of an Indian tribe. Morgan then became well acquainted with the Algonquins and other families and prepared his volume on "Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human