Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/81

Rh now much interested in studying means of personal identification, and is studying finger-tip impressions as identification material. All at present measured in the laboratory leave their finger-tip marks behind them.

Americans are particularly interested in the little Blackmore Museum at Salisbury, although at present it cuts no great figure in anthropological work. There is here a good building with fair collections of prehistorics and some ethnographical specimens. The bulk of the collections made by Squier and Davis in their exploration of American mounds, and described in their famous work, the Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, is here. This collection includes a larger number of stone pipes of the "mound-builder type" than any American collection. There are also good things from Central America and Peru. In addition to the specimens, there are in this building a great series of photographs of American Indians and a wonderful library of Americana. The story of William Blackmore's life is almost a romance, and this little American museum in the quaint old English town is one of the strangest of strange things. Would that funds and workers might be supplied to make it felt as a power in the study of American anthropology!

Both of the great universities are at work. Oxford owns the Pitt Rivers Museum, unique in conception. The collection is due to the initiative of Colonel Lane Fox (General Pitt Rivers), and has grown and developed under his guidance and that of Prof. E. B. Tylor and Mr. Henry Balfour. The objects of the museum are set forth in the following announcement, which is posted in various places:

"The specimens, ethnological and prehistoric, are arranged with a view to demonstrate either actually or hypothetically the development and continuity of the material arts from the simpler to the more complex forms; to explain the conservatism of lower and barbarous races and the pertinacity with which they retain their ancient types of art; to show the variations by means of which progress has been affected and the application of varieties to distinct uses; to exhibit survivals or vestiges of ancient forms which have been retained through natural selection in the more advanced stages of arts and reversions to such types; to illustrate the arts of prehistoric times as far as practicable by those of existing savages in corresponding stages of civilization; to assist the question of the monogenesis or poly genesis of certain arts—whether they are exotic or indigenous in the country where they are now found; and, finally, to aid in the solution of the problem whether man has arisen from the condition of the brutes or fallen from a high stage of perfection. To these ends objects of the same class from different countries have been brought