44 



Report of a Journey Around the Jlor/d. 



most agreeable and useful guide and interpreter — we often, while 

 traveling in Java, wished for his presence. He introduced us to 

 his Professors, and thus we were able to see the laboratories and 

 have a most profitable day at Delft. 



Leiden and its great Rijks Ethnographisch Museum we had 

 looked forward to with our excursion to Java in mind, for I well 

 remembered the rich stores of Javanese products which I had 

 rather slighted for want of time on my last visit. The town was 

 much the same and our hotel almost 

 unchanged. The old museum was 

 externally the same, one of a block 

 of buildings, and within was the 

 familiar superabundance of oriental 

 specimens, but the Pacific collec- 

 tions had been removed to the 

 other end of the city, to a private 

 house (or houses) opposite the Rijks 

 Museum van Natuurlijke Historie.' 

 The maps of Java (especiall}^ pre- 

 pared for some great exposition), 

 Javanese costumes, musical instru- 

 ments, and models of houses, boats 

 and machinery claimed much atten- 

 tion, but I could not see that the 

 danger of fire had been eliminated, and indeed as we left the 

 building a fire broke out in a neighboring shop, and we had an 



' While a Frenchman, Jomard, was perhaps the first to publicly suggest 

 the idea of a museum of Ethnography, it was in the town of Leiden that the 

 matter assumed a concrete form when the authorities obtained the remarka- 

 ble collections made by Philip Franz von Siebold in Japan. Siebold was a 

 Hollander, and in a letter to his friend Jomard {Lettre siir I'utilitt' dcs 

 iMiisees Ef/inograptiiques, Paris, 1843) he points out that he had already 

 taken steps both to adopt and improve on the idea of the F'rench geographer: 

 his attention had been turned to the need of following iip every trace of the 

 origins of peoples and their early migrations, by a comparative investigation 

 of their customs, forms and cult. Jomard never realized his dream, but his 

 last published work ends thus: "qu' on ne songe guere a ce niusee de la geo- 



graphie et des voyages longtemps espere, vainement attendu bien que 



I'utilite en soit incontestable." It was to a visit to this Leiden collection 

 that Thomsen owed much of his inspiration with which he made the Danish 

 Ethnographical Museum long the chief in Europe, and its place is still high 

 owing to the work of his successors, Worsaae and Mullen {Fortale tit Kata- 

 to,o;ef oz'er dct Jifliu. Miiscuui, 1S62.) [192] 



39. DR. H. H. JUVNBOIvL. 



