[4] Although his father was a wealthy merchant and banker among the elite of Huguenot Protestantism, the Lafitau family remained strong Catholics.

[3] He was familiar with important French, Spanish and English voyages, as well as ancient literature, philosophy, theology, geography, and natural history.

[5] Since the Society of Jesus offered a path to higher education in France, Lafitau joined the Jesuits at Bordeaux at fifteen.

[7] The woods were deemed unsafe for travelers and therefore he was ordered to join the Iroquois on the south shore of the St. Lawrence valley in Sault St. Louis, also known as Kahnawake.

[9] He noticed the importance of women in Iroquois society, the universality of marriage as an institution, age grading, the classificatory system of relationship, and the pulse of Indian politics in the town council.

By juxtaposing one type of behavior, or a set of beliefs and customs, to those of other cultures who have reached the same level of developmental history, their similarities and differences would reveal information about both.

[17] For example, Lafitau describes the process of making celts by Native Americans, i.e. crude axes, by rubbing flint and rock against abrasive sandstone.

Based on the empirical knowledge it can be extrapolated that the "thunder stones" were not deposited by lightning, rather they were made and used by the Gallic hunters, much in the same way as Native Americans use Celts.

[19]According to Anthony Pagden, Lafitau argued for the possibility of translating all human behavior, especially religious, into a language which he called "Symbolic Theology", which would explain the universal cultural patterns such as marriage, government and religion.

It would familiarize and elevate the image of the Native Americans by making them share in the qualities of the cultures that were still held in high esteem among the Europeans.

[25] By using the Comparative Method, Lafitau rejected all theories of social and cultural change and instead used his study to demonstrate the similarities in customs, practices, and usages of the Native North Americans with diverse peoples from different continents and centuries.

[2] It was on his search for ginseng that Lafitau began to question Mohawk herbalists, gaining information of native customs and beliefs, which he hoped would benefit European knowledge of medicine.

[27] First learning about the ginseng of Tartary (i.e. Northern China) from the writings of the Jesuit missionary Pierre Jartoux, Lafitau surmised that the conditions in North America would be favorable to the plant.

His published report the Mémoire...concernant la précieuse plante du gin-seng in 1718 set off a hunt by market collectors who exported ginseng to China via France.

[7] As the son of a merchant, Lafitau was keen to describe the medical properties of ginseng in Galenic terms, which facilitated marketing the plant to European consumers across the world.

[10] 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.

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.

[37] 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.