JOSEPH HENRY’S COPY
MORGAN, Lewis Henry.
Ancient Society or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, through Barbarism to Civilization.
New York, Holt, 1877.
8vo, pp. xvi, 560; some very minor toning and occasional spotting, but a very good copy; bound in the original brown cloth, front board gilt with emblem, spine gilt, slightly rubbed; ownership inscription of Joseph Henry, scientist, to flyleaf, offsetting from signature to title-page and front free endpaper; engraved portrait with facsimile signature loosely laid in with a cutting depicting Morgan, from which some offsetting to flyleaf; one other cutting loosely laid in.
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Ancient Society or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, through Barbarism to Civilization.
First edition. Morgan’s influential work was considered by Marx and Engels to be putatively supportive of materialist history. Marx’s notes on this book were reputedly the source for Engels’s Origins of the Family, of private Property and the State, published in German in 1844. Morgan posits a three-stage evolutionary history, from savagery to barbarism to civilization, similar to the four-stage theory of the Scottish Enlightenment. This contained elements of Morgan’s earlier studies of the matrilineal Haudenosanee (Iroquois) and consanguinity in family groups.
Provenance:
This copy belonged to Joseph Henry, an American scientist known for his work with electromagnets and for inventing precursors to the doorbell and the telegraph. He was the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, which in its early years, as now, was extremely interested in American anthropology, and it is in this capacity that he became known to Morgan, with the Smithsonian publishing Morgan’s Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family in 1868. Between the submission of the manuscript of Systems in around 1865 and its publication, nearly one hundred letters were exchanged between Morgan and Henry. Their friendship, despite some trials, including a fierce controversy over the dedication of Systems to Morgan’s deceased daughters, which Henry felt was out of place, was warm and sustained by a spirit of scientific collaboration and numerous visits in person (White, ‘The Correspondence between Lewis Henry Morgan and Joseph Henry’ in The University of Rochester Library Bulletin, Vol XII.2 (1957)).
