The special issues which for a test Morgan takes with Bancroft are in regard to the character of the house in which Montezuma lived, and of the dinner which is represented by Bernal Diaz and the rest as the daily banquet of an imperial potentate. Morgan’s criticism is in his _Houses and House Life of the American Aborigines_ (Washington, 1881).[990] The basis of this book had been intended for a fifth Part of his _Ancient Society_, but was not used in that publication. He printed the material, however, in papers on “Montezuma’s Dinner” (_No. Am. Rev._, Ap. 1876), “Houses of the Moundbuilders” (_Ibid._, July, 1876), and “Study of the Houses and House Life of the Indian Tribes” (_Archæol. Inst. of Amer. Publ._). These papers amalgamated now make the work called _Houses and House Life_.[991] Morgan argues that a communal mode of living accords with the usages of aboriginal hospitality, as well as with their tenure of lands,[992] and with the large buildings, which others call palaces, and he calls joint tenement houses. He instances, as evidence of the size of such houses, that at Cholula four hundred Spaniards and one thousand allied Indians found lodging in such a house; and he points to Stephens’s description of similar communal establishments which he found in our day near Uxmal.[993] He holds that the inference of communal living from such data as these is sufficient to warrant a belief in it, although none of the early Spanish writers mention such communism as existing; while they actually describe a communal feast in what is known as Montezuma’s dinner;[994] and while the plans of the large buildings now seen in ruins are exactly in accord with the demands of separate families united in joint occupancy. In such groups, he holds, there is usually one building devoted to the purpose of a Tecpan, or official house of the tribe.[995] Under the pressure to labor, which the Spaniards inflicted on their occupants, these communal dwellers were driven, to escape such servitude, into the forest, and thus their houses fell into decay. Morgan’s views attracted the adhesion of not a few archæologists, like Bandelier and Dawson; but in Bancroft, as contravening the spirit of his _Native Races_, they begat feelings that substituted disdain for convincing arguments.[996] The less passionate controversialists point out, with more effect, how hazardous it is, in coming to conclusions on the quality of the Nahua, Maya, or Quiché conditions of life, to ignore such evidences as those of the hieroglyphics, the calendars, the architecture and carvings, the literature and the industries, as evincing quite another kind, rather than degree, of progress, from that of the northern Indians.[997] II. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES UPON THE RUINS AND ARCHÆOLOGICAL REMAINS OF MEXICO AND CENTRAL AMERICA.