226 Rmnit WUtshire Book^, Pamphlets, and Articles. 



now supplied, and with it has given us a full memoir of the General's 

 life, more especially as connected with his archaeological excavations and 

 writings, and an apparently exhaustive bibliographical list of those 

 writings. In this memoir he has incorporated the long and valuable 

 eulogium of the General's methods as an anthropologist which formed 

 the subject of the presidential address delivered by Mr. Henry Balfour 

 to the Anthropological Section of the British Association in 1904 with 

 especial reference to the "Pitt Rivers Collection" at Oxford, now the 

 foremost ethnological collection in the kingdom for educational 

 purposes. " The story of [said Mr. Balfour] the famous ethnological 

 collection of Colonel Lane Fox (Gen. Pitt Rivers) is well known, and I 

 need but briefly refer to it. During his investigations, conducted with 

 a view to ascertaining the best methods whereby the service firearms 

 might be improved, at a time when the old Tower musket was being 

 finally discarded, he was forcibly struck by the extremely gradual 

 changes whereby improvements were effected . . . Through noticing 

 the unfailing regularity of this process of gradual evolution in the case 

 of firearms, he was led to believe that the same principles must probably 

 govern the development of the other arts, appliances, and ideas of 

 mankind. With characteristic energy and scientific zeal Col. Lane Fox 

 began at once, in the year 1851, tft illustrate his views and to put them 

 to a practical test. He forthwith commenced to make the ethnological 

 collection with which his name will always be associated, and which 

 rapidly grew to large proportions, under his keen search for material 

 which should illustrate and perhaps prove his theory of progress by 

 evolution in the arts of mankind ... It was a fundamental principle 

 in the general theory of Col. Lane Fox that in the arts and customs of 

 still living savage and barbaric peoples there are reflected to a con- 

 siderable extent the various strata of human culture in the past, and 

 that it is possible to re-construct in some degree the life and industries 

 of man in prehistoric times by a study of existing races in corresponding 

 stages of civilization. ... I have endeavoured in this address to 

 dwell upon some of the main principles laid down by Col. Lane Fox as 

 the result of his special researches in the field of ethnology, and my 

 object has been ... to bear witness to the very great importance 

 of his contribution to the scientific study of the arts of mankind and the 

 development of culture in general, and to remind students of anthropology 

 of the debt which we owe to him, not only for the results of his very able 

 investigations, but also for the stimulus which he imparted to research 

 in some of the branches of this comprehensive science." 



Mr. Gray has done well in reprinting this address and reminding 

 us that the general's name will live as a scientific ethnologist, even more 

 perhaps than as the great archaeological investigator, in which character 

 we knew him best in Wiltshire. Of his excavations, both before and after 

 his inheritance of the Rushmore estate, the author gives a systematic 

 account, and the memoir as a whole is a valuable addition to the list of 

 Wiltshire biographies. 



Reviewed, Antiquary, July, 1905, vol. 1., p. 277. 



