THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL COLLECTIONS. 
25 
the most part were very crowded in small rooms and passages 
and were very incomplete. Until additional protected space 
was available, it was not possible to complete them or arrange 
if 
them in a more satisfactory manner, so as to give readily a 
good general idea of the principal races and tribes inhabiting 
the different parts of India and more particularly of Bengal 
and Assam, their ways of living and indigenous arts or 
manufactures. 
Mr. (now Sir Alexander) Pedler was in charge of the Eco¬ 
nomic and Art Museum from 1884, and in the Report for 
1886-87 makes the following remarks on the state of the 
ethnological collections:— 
This collection occupies a series of five rooms to the south of the 
Museum buildings, together with an enclosed verandah running along 
them; also it occupies two large halls to the south-east of the buildings 
near the tank, and lastly a large temporary hall to the east of two sheds. 
The ethnological collection now in the Museum consists of two 
distinct collections. The first was made for the Calcutta International 
Exhibition in 1883-84, while the second was that formerly under the 
Trustees of the Indian Museum, but was handed over to the Economic 
Museum in 1885. These collections have been amalgamated to a certain 
extent, but in such a way that the two collections can be at once distin¬ 
guished by their labels. 
The ethnological collection belonging to the Bengal Government 
numbered 2817, while the collection handed over by the Imperial Museum 
extended to about 3700 specimens, or 6517 in all. 
At length, in 1888, the Government of Bengal was able 
to commence the construction of the new building which it 
had in 1882 undertaken to erect. The wing was finished in 
1891, and the removal of the collections of the Economic and 
Art Section was commenced; the Ethnological Gallery was 
opened to the public on January 1st, 1893. It is situated in 
the north-east wing of the Museum buildings and has an 
area of 7304 square feet. 
The combined collections were at first arranged geogra¬ 
phically. Life-sized figures or models of some particular 
tribe or of the population of a particular part of India were 
placed in the central cases, while objects such as arms, im¬ 
plements, clothes, ornaments, domestic utensils, musical 
instruments and articles connected with religious observances 
of the same people were placed in wall-cases opposite. The 
