ABSTRACT

In the 1870s, a provincial American lawyer, Lewis Henry Morgan, produced what was to become one of the most influential versions of the theory of primitive society. Perhaps it was because of his very isolation, in Rochester, New York, that he was able to synthesise a stream of ideas that came from across the Atlantic, but he was not working altogether alone. Rochester had a lively intellectual culture,1and his good friend the Rev. McIlvaine, the Presbyterian minister, was a philologist and something of a Sanskrit scholar. It was McIlvaine who encouraged Morgan to develop his ideas, provided him with a crucial inspiration when he had reached an impasse, and secured the eventual publication of his first important theoretical work by the Smithsonian Institution. Morgan dedicated Ancient Society to his friend.