Yankee Scientist

EUROPEAN TRAVEL JOURNAL -- Lewis Henry Morgan--Rochester Historical So- ciety (75-c-).

One night go-odd years ago, a group of wild young rapscallions broke into a Masonic temple in Cayuga County, N. Y., put on the ceremonial robes and organized a mock secret society. One of these young limbs was an eloquent, enterprising Union College graduate named Lewis Henry Morgan. A crusading teetotaler but a hard smoker and poker player who had leisure for such japes because hard times kept him from practicing law, Morgan became secretary of the burlesque secret society, turned it into a serious organization called The New Confederacy of the Iroquois. To work up authentic initiation ceremonies he visited nearby Indian reservations. Soon he had become more interested in the red man's lore than in the white man's law, presently had the New Confederacy giving 30% of its income for Indian welfare.

The results were far-reaching. First Morgan stopped a particularly gross theft of Seneca lands, when shysters, with New York Senate connivance, rum and $200,000 in bribes, tried to defraud the Indians by paying $1.67 an acre for land worth $16. Then he published his classic study that gave for the first time "the real structure and principles of the League of the Iroquois." The book launched him on a career that made him ''the father of American anthropology" and "the greatest sociologist of the last century."

Another result was that Morgan paradoxically became a conservative, straitlaced, churchgoing U. S. businessman, withal a radical hero. Friedrich Engels, after reading Morgan's studies of primitive man, corrected The Communist Manifesto. Marx and Engels drew on Morgan's findings on primitive family relationships in writing The Origin of the Family. Meanwhile, Morgan settled in Rochester, N. Y., married a cousin, became a director in railway & mining companies and piled up $100,000 before he died in 1881. He was elected State senator in 1867, but his legislative career was notable only for his attempt to block an investigation of the gigantic Erie Railroad swindle.

Although Morgan has been the subject of many a scientific memoir, U. S. readers got their first intimate glimpse of him last week, when Professor Leslie A. White edited a 174-page, paperbound volume of extracts from a journal that Morgan kept on a European journey in 1870-71. A good introduction, it traces the grand tour he took with his wife & son to Edinburgh, Rome, Berlin and Paris. It shows him as a good-natured, hard-headed patriot, as provincial as General Grant, gawking at every cathedral, castle, museum and picture gallery. But it shows him also as a distinguished scientist, meeting Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley on equal terms. A stanch Presbyterian, he hated Episcopalians and Catholics, but thought the Congregationalists would win out in the end. The only thing he wholeheartedly admired was European art in general, nudes in particular. He studied representations of Venus all over Europe, found little fault with any of them, although he thought Rubens should have put more clothes on his wife before he painted her.

Morgan's European Travel Journal gives a better picture of the man than of his achievements or his professional standing. But it suggests the rich observations that may remain in the 18,000 unpublished pages of Morgan's writing, now packed away in the library of the University of Rochester.

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