Writers on the ethnology of Italy have been hitherto content with the first, namely, the broad distinction.
The little that is known concerning the doings of the natives before the appearance of the white man belongs to the domain of ethnology rather than of history.
In both fields he displayed much talent, and by writing his Synopsis of the Indian Tribes within the United States East of the Rocky Mountains and in the British and Russian Possessions in North America (1836), and by founding the American Ethnological Society of New York in 1842, he earned the title of "Father of American Ethnology."
Its causes and results are fundamental for the study of ethnology (formation and mixture of races), of political and social history (formation of states and survival of institutions), and of political economy (mobility of labour and utilization of productive forces).
He has brought together, in the Bureau of American Ethnology in Washington, many hundreds of manuscripts, written by travellers, traders, missionaries, and scholars; and, better still, in response to circulars, carefully prepared vocabularies, texts and long native stories have been written out by trained collectors.