Abstract
IN conferring the title of ‘professor’ on Dr. Henry Balfour, curator of the Pitt-Rivers Museum since 1891, the University of Oxford has elected to honour one of her sons whose lifelong devotion to an idea, pursued with characteristic self-effacement and sanity of outlook, has built up from its modest beginnings an institution of world-wide repute and of unique standing among ethnographical collections. In the Pitt-Rivers Museum and in his many writings on technology in cultural development, Prof. Balfour has applied and extended the principle of evolution in material culture formulated by General Pitt-Rivers, whose collections provided the nucleus of the Museum, in such a manner that it has become one of the most powerful instruments of research in the hands of the student of artistic and technical achievement, as well as of the movements and contacts of peoples in the history of civilisation in the broadest sense. Since the death of Sir Edward Tylor in 1917?indeed from the time he relinquished his office in 1909?the chair of anthropology in the University of Oxford, for purely domestic reasons, has been vacant. The organisation of separate studies in the subject, which has obtained in the interval, no doubt has not been without its advantages, academic and other. Though anthropologists may entertain some feeling of regret that this group of studies at Oxford is still without its professor, they will admit that this circumstance enhances the signal character of the honour now conferred on the technological studies associated with the Pitt-Rivers Museum and of the personal tribute to its curator.
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Prof. Henry Balfour and the Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford. Nature 136, 861 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/136861c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/136861c0