While these facts bear testimony to a good natural capacity, it is also true that the receptivity of the race for a foreign civilization is not great. Even individual instances of highly educated Indians are rare; and I do not recall any who have achieved distinction in art or science, or large wealth in the business world. The culture of the native Americans strongly attests the ethnic unity of the race. This applies equally to the ruins and relics of its vanished nations, as to the institutions of existing tribes. Nowhere do we find any trace of foreign influence or instruction, nowhere any arts or social systems to explain which we must evoke the aid of teachers from the eastern hemisphere. The culture of the American race, in whatever degree they possessed it, was an indigenous growth, wholly self-developed, owing none of its germs to any other race, ear-marked with the psychology of the stock. Furthermore, this culture was not, as is usually supposed, monopolized by a few nations of the race. The distinction that has been set up by so many ethnographers between “wild tribes” and “civilized tribes,” _Jägervölker_ and _Culturvölker_, is an artificial one, and conveys a false idea of the facts. There was no such sharp line. Different bands of the same linguistic stock were found, some on the highest, others on the lowest stages of development, as is strikingly exemplified in the Uto-Aztecan family. Wherever there was a center of civilization, that is, wherever the surroundings favored the development of culture, tribes of different stocks enjoyed it to nearly an equal degree, as in central Mexico and Peru. By them it was distributed, and thus shaded off in all directions. When closely analyzed, the difference between the highest and the average culture of the race is much less than has been usually taught. The Aztecs of Mexico and the Algonkins of the eastern United States were not far apart, if we overlook the objective art of architecture and one or two inventions. To contrast the one as a wild or savage with the other as a civilized people, is to assume a false point of view and to overlook their substantial psychical equality. For these reasons American culture, wherever examined, presents a family likeness which the more careful observers of late years have taken pains to put in a strong light. This was accomplished for governmental institutions and domestic architecture by Lewis H. Morgan, for property rights and the laws of war by A. F. Bandelier, for the social condition of Mexico and Peru by Dr. Gustav Brühl, and I may add for the myths and other expressions of the religious sentiment by myself.[47]