illustrations of this fact in the United States. Moreover, it must be remembered that McLennan was, so to say, the official founder and leader of the English prehistoric school. It was almost a requirement of good prehistoric manners to refer in terms of highest admiration to his artificial construction of history leading from infanticide through polyandry and abduction to maternal law. The least doubt in the strictly independent existence of exogamous and endogamous tribes was considered a frivolous sacrilege. According to this view, Morgan, in reducing all these sacred dogmas to thin air, committed an act of wanton destruction. And worse still, his mere manner of reducing them sufficed to show their instability, so that the admirers of McLennan, who hitherto had been stumbling about helplessly between exogamy and endogamy, were almost forced to slap their foreheads and exclaim: "How silly of us, not to have found that out long ago!"
Just as if Morgan had not committed crimes enough against the official archaeologists to justify them in discarding all fair methods and assuming an attitude of cool neglect, he persisted in filling their cup to overflowing. Not only does he criticise civilization, the society of production for profit, the fundamental form of human society, in a manner savoring of Fourier, but he also speaks of a future reorganization of society in language that Karl Marx might have used. Consequently, he receives his just deserts, when McLennan indignantly charges him with a profound antipathy against historical methods, and when Professor Giraud-Teulon of Geneva endorses the same view in 1884. For was not the same Professor Giraud-Teulon still wandering about aimlessly in the maze of McLennan's exogamy in 1874 (Origines de la famille)? And was it not Morgan who finally had to set him free?
It is not necessary to dwell in this preface on the other forms of progress which primeval history owes to Morgan. Reference to them will be found in the course of my work. During the fourteen years that have elapsed since the publication of his main work, the material contributing