THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL COLLECTIONS. 
27 
When the ethnological collections were placed under the 
present head of the zoological section, himself a student of 
anthropology, it was hoped that a rapid growth both in the 
number of specimens and in the work undertaken upon them 
would become possible; but the staff of the new section (four 
scientific men) proved all too small even for the increase that 
took place at the same time in the zoological work. 
Within the last ten years there have been but two 
important accessions, namely the collection made in the 
course of the Abor Expedition of 1911-1912 by Mr. S. W. 
Kemp and Mr. J. Coggin Brown, and the magnificent series of 
Japanese and Bengali musical instruments presented at the 
beginning of 1914 by Raja Sir Sourindro Mohun Tagore in 
commemoration of the centenary of the Museum and as a 
proof of his loyalty to the Crown. 
The Abor collection includes specimens of the somewhat 
scanty implements, clothing, utensils, etc., of one of the 
most interesting tribes on the North-East Frontier of India, 
and in particular of the curious bronze bowls which the Abors 
procure from the confines of Tibet and use as a kind of 
currency or emergency fund. Many of the objects included 
in the collection are illustrated in Sir George Duff-Sutherland- 
Dunbar’s account of the ethnology of the Abors published 
in 1914 in the Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. 
The late Raja Sir Sourindro Mohun Tagore h whose inter¬ 
est in and knowledge of Indian music in all its phases had 
a world-wide reputation, presented, with other members of 
his family (p. 23), to the Museum nearly forty years 
ago a collection of Indian instruments that rendered the 
collection as a whole perhaps more complete in this direction 
than in any other. His recent donation includes the com¬ 
plete set of instruments prepared in 1875 for the Bengali 
band that played before King Edward VII when he visited 
Calcutta as Prince of Wales. It also includes a set of Japa¬ 
nese instruments presented to the Raja by His Imperial 
Majesty the late Emperor of Japan. As many of the Japa¬ 
nese musical instruments probably had their origin in India, 
^ He died in June, 1914. 
