384 THOMAS THOMSEN. 
ethnographical collection. The first part of this work was already done}; 
all that remained was, practically speaking, to describe the find made 
at Nualik already referred to. The unique quantity of material thus 
obtained from a single house furnished an excellent basis for a valuable 
piece of work on the culture of the Angmagsalik Eskimo at the time 
immediately previous to the Danish occupation. This task, however, 
interesting though it might seem in itself, failed to satisfy our Editor, 
who “laid before the Commission .... a plan of wider scope, in accor- 
dance with which the description of Amprup’s collection was to be 
published jointly with an English edition of Horm’s Ethnological Sketch 
of the Angmagsalik Eskimo, along with the anthropological papers which 
had appeared in ,Meddelelser om Grønland” as the results of his famous 
expedition, and with new illustrations of his collection”, And it is 
beyond question that Ногм’з work, which was out of print, well deserved 
to be issued in a new edition, calculated to reach a wider circle of readers, 
and illustrated with modern reproductions on a larger scale, and more 
generally representative of the collection, in place of the crude lithographs 
which had served the purpose of the original work. With these two 
widely different tasks before him, then: to describe a collection, and 
to compile a new edition of a series of previously published papers, the 
Editor set to work. 
Still insatiate, however, as it would seem, he continued to drag 
in new matter, which, gradually mounting up, threatened to submerge 
the original plan altogether: Amprup’s interesting find, the principal 
value of which lay in the fact of its forming a single whole, is cut up 
into scattered illustrations, with no attempt at special and collective 
treatment, while the new illustrations prepared for Horm's work are 
removed from their place in the same and strewn, together with those 
of Amprup’s and many other collections, throughout the mentioned 
Part VII. 
The inadvisability of such a method of treatment will easily be 
realised. Нотм’з treatise appears no longer as an independent work, 
but as an appendix to that which forms the subject of the present obser- 
vations. Its unity even is destroyed, while the illustrations with which 
it now appears have been drawn from different collections varying con- 
siderably in point of time and place. And finally, the Editor has not 
succeeded in dissociating the English translation from the original 
Danish edition, to which, albeit the work is no longer ordinarily pro- 
curable, reference is not infrequently made for illustrations. 
1 Ethnological description of the Amdrup Collection from East Greenland. 
Cop. 1909 (Medd. om Grønland vol. 28). This part of the work will be 
dealt with later on. It is referred to in the following pages as Thalb. I. 
22 CL" Бао Тр 
