Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/642

 expedition to Melanesia, when he worked with Mr. A. M. Hocart and collaborated with Mr. G. C. Wheeler, who was at work in the Shortland Islands. It was not long after his return that Rivers showed that, influenced by the theories of Kohler, he was working upon a new aspect of the ethnological problem, and his Presidential Address to Section H. at the Portsmouth meeting of the British Association, in which he dealt with the Ethnological Analysis of Culture, indicated in outline the theories which he afterwards worked out in detail in The History of Melanesian Society, his most important contribution to anthropological literature, which was published in 1914. In the same year Rivers made his second expedition to Melanesia, but his further labours in this field were interrupted by the war.

During the war the call of other duties necessarily curtailed his activities in anthropology, although he contributed a number of important papers to various scientific journals. The in- fluence of his work in connexion with the treatment of shell shock and other forms of nervous disorder caused by the war was shown in a number of contributions to the literature of the subject which he published at this time. His attention was also directed towards the theories of Freud, which he examined with much critical acumen. As a result, in 1920 he published his Instinct and the Unconscious, in which the psychic problems suggested by the war were discussed on a biological basis. A second edition was published in the current year.

It is idle to speculate what the future might have held for Rivers ; yet it is not beyond conjecture that at the moment of his death he had entered upon a phase of his career in which his clear and logical mind as well as his scientific training and experience might have been of inestimable value to mankind. Throughout his life his interest in the problems of the study of man never ceased to broaden, and as time went on he became more and more closely in touch with the realities of existence. His training as a psychologist had given him a grasp of the fundamental subjective value of social institutions which is within the reach of few observers, while his experience in psycho- therapeutics during the war had confirmed and at the same time broadened his conception of the applicability of the results of psychological study to the practical problems of every-day