[Footnote 102: "It was no easy task to accomplish such a fundamental change, however simple and obvious it may now seem.... Anterior to experience, a township, as the unit of a political system, was abstruse enough to tax the Greeks and Romans to the depths of their capacities before the conception was formed and set in practical operation." Morgan, _Ancient Society_, p. 218.] [Sidenote: Suspicions as to the erroneousness of the Spanish accounts.] [Sidenote: Detection and explanation of the errors, by Lewis Morgan.] The first eminent writer to express a serious doubt as to the correctness of the earlier views of Mexican civilization was that sagacious Scotchman, William Robertson.[103] The illustrious statesman and philologist, Albert Gallatin, founder of the American Ethnological Society, published in the first volume of its "Transactions" an essay which recognized the danger of trusting the Spanish narratives without very careful and critical scrutiny.[104] It is to be observed that Mr. Gallatin approached the subject with somewhat more knowledge of aboriginal life in America than had been possessed by previous writers. A similar scepticism was expressed by Lewis Cass, who also knew a great deal about Indians.[105] Next came Mr. Morgan,[106] the man of path-breaking ideas, whose minute and profound acquaintance with Indian life was joined with a power of penetrating the hidden implications of facts so keen and so sure as to amount to genius. Mr. Morgan saw the nature of the delusion under which the Spaniards laboured; he saw that what they mistook for feudal castles owned by great lords, and inhabited by dependent retainers, were really huge communal houses, owned and inhabited by clans, or rather by segments of overgrown clans. He saw this so vividly that it betrayed him now and then into a somewhat impatient and dogmatic manner of statement; but that was a slight fault, for what he saw was not the outcome of dreamy speculation but of scientific insight. His researches, which reduced "Montezuma's empire" to a confederacy of tribes dwelling in pueblos, governed by a council of chiefs, and collecting tribute from neighbouring pueblos, have been fully sustained by subsequent investigation. [Footnote 103: Robertson's _History of America_, 9th ed. vol. iii. pp. 274, 281.] [Footnote 104: "Notes on the Semi-civilized Nations of Mexico, Yucatan, and Central America," _American Ethnological Society's Transactions_, vol. i., New York, 1852. There is a brief account of Mr. Gallatin's pioneer work in American philology and ethnology in Stevens's _Albert Gallatin_, pp. 386-396.] [Footnote 105: Cass, "Aboriginal Structures," _North Amer. Review_, Oct., 1840.]