Address delivered at the anniversary meeting of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, January 22nd, 1884, on the aims and prospects of the study of anthropology / by W.H. Flower.

  • Flower, William Henry, 1831-1899.
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Address delivered at the anniversary meeting of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, January 22nd, 1884, on the aims and prospects of the study of anthropology / by W.H. Flower. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

    13/18 (page 11)
    advantage and instruction of British anthropologists, an invalu- able series of specimens otherwise probably destined to have been dispersed or lost to the country for ever. This collection consists of 24 skeletons and 1,539 crania, making, with the remainder of the College collection, a total of 3,032 specimens illustrating the osteological modifications of the human species. These are all in excellent order, clean, accessible, and catalogued in a manner convenient for reference, although somewhat too crowded in their present locality to be readily available for observation. Large as is this collection, and rich in rare and interesting types, it is far from exhaustive; many great groups are almost or entirely unrepresented even by crania, and the series of skeletons is (with the exception of one race only, the Anda- manese) quite insufficient to give any correct idea of the average proportions of the different parts of the framework. In fact, such a collection as would be required for this purpose must be quite beyond the resources of, as well as out of place in, any but a national museum. The collections illustrating anatomical anthropology in the University museums of Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, and Dublin have all greatly increased of late, but for the reasons just given they can never be expected to attain the dimensions required for the study of the subject in its profoundest details. The small, but very choice collections formed by the officers of the Medical Department of the army, and kept in the museum of the Royal Victoria Hospital at Netley, and that of the navy at Haslar Hospital, are, I believe, in a stationary condition, but in good preservation. Our own collection, which also contains some valuable specimens (notably the complete skeleton of one of the extinct Tasmanian aborigines, presented by the late Mr. Morton Allport), and which during the past year has been catalogued for the first time by Mr. Bloxam, has not been added to, owing to a feeling which the Council has long entertained, and which induced them to part with the ethnological collection,