But how, it may be asked, is a government so purely popular, and so simple and essentially advisory in its character, to be reconciled with the laws of hereditary descent, fixed by the establishment of heraldic devices, and bringing its proportion of weak and incompetent minds into office, and with the actual power it exercised, and the fame it acquired? To answer this question, and to shew how the aristocratic and democratic principles were made to harmonize, in the Iroquois government, it will be necessary to go back, and examine the law of descent among the tribes, together with the curious and intricate principles of the TOTEMIC BOND. Nothing is more fully under the cognizance of observers of the manners and customs of this people, than the fact of the entire mass of a canton or tribe’s being separated into distinct clans, each of which is distinguished by the name and device of some quadruped, bird, or other object in the animal kingdom. This device is called, among the Algonquins, (where the same separation into families or clans, exists,) TOTEM, and we shall employ the term here, as being already well known to writers. But while the Algonquins have made no other use of it, but to trace consanguinity, or at least, remote affinities of families, and while they have also separated into wild independencies and tribes, who have assumed new tribal names, and wandered and crossed each other’s track and boundaries in a thousand ways, the Iroquois have turned it to account by assuming it as the very basis of their political and tribal bond. How far fixity of territorial possession and proximity of location may have favored or led to the establishment of this new bond, need not be inquired into here, but, while we express no opinion favorable to the remote antiquity of their residence in the north, it must be evident that this tie would have lost all its binding force if the Alleghanies, the Great Lakes, or any other very wide geographical areas, had been interposed between them, and thus interrupted frequent and full intercourse and united action. A government wholly verbal, must be conceded to have required this proximity and nearness of access. The Senecas may be selected as an example of the influence of the Totemic bond. This canton is still the most numerous of the existing Iroquois tribes. By the recent census, the results of which accompany these papers, they number over two thousand four hundred souls. This population is, theoretically, separated into eight clans or original families, who are distinguished respectively by the totems of the wolf, the bear, the turtle, the deer, the beaver, the falcon, the crane and the plover. Theory at this time, founded doubtless on actual consanguinity in their inceptive age, makes these clans brothers. It is contrary to their usages that near kindred should intermarry, and the ancient rule interdicts all intermarriage between persons of the same clan. They must marry into a clan whose