384 Thomas Thomsen. 



ethnographical collection. The first part of this work was already done 1 ; 

 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 Amdrup's collection was to be 

 published jointly with an English edition of Holm'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" 2 . And it is 

 beyond question that Holm's 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: Amdrup'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 Holm's work are 

 removed from their place in the same and strewn, together with those 

 of Amdrup's and many other collections, throughout the mentioned 

 Part VII. 



The inadvisability of such a method of treatment will easily be 

 realised. Holm's 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 Bast 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. 



2 Cf. Thalb. II, p. I— II. 



