known and very few copies are in circulation. In Histoire des découvertes et conquestes des Portugais dans le Nouveau Monde, Lafitau wrote two volumes in an attempt to make available to French readers details of exploration and adventure that were unknown to them. These commonly read and used chronicles of customs were published in 1733. Continuing with the same development of customs discussed in his first major work Moeurs des Sauvages Amériquains, Lafitau maintains that customs can only be understood in the original language of those who practice them. Return to France Lafitau returned to France in November 1717. There he pleaded to colonial authorities that the brandy trade was forcing the Iroquois to move from Sault St. Louis to avoid the liquor trafficking. By arguing that the brandy trade with the Natives of Canada was against the interests of the Colony and the State, Lafitau was successful in stopping a lot of this activity. The manuscript for his work on the Iroquois was submitted and approved in Paris on May 15, 1722. The ideas and writing style of Lafitau have been identified as characteristic of Cartesian Linguistics. His ideas were published at an important intersection between French Classicism and the New Rationalism that favored reason over authority and the stability of the laws of nature. The originality of Lafitau's work was not fully recognized during his lifetime because many of his ideas seemed similar to those published by earlier writers, but scholars of later centuries paid tribute to his unprecedented systematic comparative and evolutionary anthropology. Footnotes References Giovannetti-Singh, Gianamar (2021). "Galenizing the New World: Joseph-François Lafitau's 'Galenization' of Canadian Ginseng, ca 1716-1724". Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science. 75 (1): 59-72. External links Lafitau's Customs of the American Indians compared with customs of primitive times, provided by the Champlain Society 1681 births 1746 deaths 18th-century French Jesuits French Roman Catholic missionaries Jesuit missionaries in New France French ethnologists French naturalists Roman Catholic missionaries in Canada