[Sidenote: Distinction between Savagery and Barbarism.] [Sidenote: Origin of pottery.] Below _Civilization_ Mr. Morgan[23] distinguishes two principal grades or stages of culture, namely _Savagery_ and _Barbarism_. There is much looseness and confusion in the popular use of these terms, and this is liable to become a fruitful source of misapprehension in the case of any statement involving either of them. When popular usage discriminates between them it discriminates in the right direction; there is a vague but not uncertain feeling that savagery is a lower stage than barbarism. But ordinarily the discrimination is not made and the two terms are carelessly employed as if interchangeable. Scientific writers long since recognized a general difference between savagery and barbarism, but Mr. Morgan was the first to suggest a really useful criterion for distinguishing between them. His criterion is the making of pottery; and his reason for selecting it is that the making of pottery is something that presupposes village life and more or less progress in the simpler arts. The earlier methods of boiling food were either putting it into holes in the ground lined with skins and then using heated stones, or else putting it into baskets coated with clay to be supported over a fire. The clay served the double purpose of preventing liquids from escaping and protecting the basket against the flame. It was probably observed that the clay was hardened by the fire, and thus in course of time it was found that the clay would answer the purpose without the basket.[24] Whoever first made this ingenious discovery led the way from savagery to barbarism. Throughout the present work we shall apply the name "savages" only to uncivilized people who do not make pottery. [Footnote 23: See his great work on _Ancient Society_, New York, 1877.] [Footnote 24: See the evidence in Tylor, _Researches into the Early History of Mankind_, pp. 269-272; cf. Lubbock, _Prehistoric Times_, p. 573; and see Cushing's masterly "Study of Pueblo Pottery," etc., _Reports of Bureau of Ethnology_, iv., 473-521.] [Sidenote: Lower status of savagery.] But within each of these two stages Mr. Morgan distinguishes three subordinate stages, or Ethnic Periods, which may be called either lower, middle, and upper status, or older, middle, and later periods. The lower status of savagery was that wholly prehistoric stage when men lived in their original restricted habitat and subsisted on fruit and nuts. To this period must be assigned the beginning of articulate speech. All existing races of men had passed beyond it at an unknown antiquity. [Sidenote: Middle status of savagery.]