460 WILLIAM THALBITZER, 
PETERSEN did not know “its importance to the Danish Museum” (foot- 
note p. 394) we can better appreciate the clever manner in which this 
circumstance was turned to account by the Director in his endeavours 
to procure the collection and give as little as possible for it. 
This is the first Greenland collection of any importance which the 
Museum has actually purchased. Up to that time, the Ethnographical 
Department had shown but slight interest in its rich Greenland col- 
lections, or indeed in the ethnography of Greenland at all. There is 
absolutely no reason for the authorities to be surprised at the fact that 
the collector finally preferred to offer tke last of his collections to another 
Museum, more especially since it consisted mainly of duplicates of speci- 
mens which he had previously sent to the Danish Museum. 
It is indeed remarkable altogether that the Ethnographical De- 
partment of the Museum should venture to touch upon the question of 
moral obligations in the case of its relations with a man who, indepen- 
dently of the Museum, interested himself in ethnographical work, and who 
had made considerable sacrifices in order to save the last remains of native 
culture for the cause of science. In the ethnographical sphere, the De- 
partment has to a regrettable degree lacked initiative. To quote but 
a single example; it was not at the initiative, or with the support, of 
the Department, that its cases came to contain what is now the classi- 
cal base of all collections from East Greenland. Why has there not 
long since been set on foot a collecting enterprise in West Greenland 
similar to that of С. Horm at Ammassalik? How much is now irre- 
trievably lost to science in this sphere, owing to the lack of understanding 
or of will in the central organ? 
I felt this strongly myself when, in 1900, I visited the ruins and 
refuse-heaps of Sermermiut at the mouth of the great icefjord near Ja- 
kobshavn; when I later passed the site of the well known Qegertaq finds 
in the innermost corner of Disco Bay; and when I wintered in the deep 
fjords of the Umanak and Egedesminde districts, where great quanti- 
ties of ruins, graves and kitchen-middens testify to the ancient Eskimo 
occupation. These are the regions where our countryman, Dr. PFAFF, 
a generation ago got together his great and unique collection of Eskimo 
antiquities, which, after having been rejected by the Danish Museum, 
were sold to a Swedish patron of science, and are now in the possession 
of the Ethnographical Department of the Riksmuseum at Stockholm!. 
There are always a number of private persons or state employees eager 
to procure curiosities of this sort, but it would surely seem that our 
National Museum, as an ethnographical centre, should long since have 
been foremost among those interested in such collection work, and for 
ethnographical research work in Greenland generally. 
In our day, when so many regions of primitive culture are being 
destroyed or undergoing change, ethnographical museums have every- 
1 See Medd. om Grønland, 39 (1914) p. 669. 
