S&SWM PR papers L1788

Penmaenmawr Apr 13 97

Dear General Pitt-Rivers

It was a pleasure to recognize your handwriting this morning after so long a time since last hearing. I am sorry to hear of your having been out of health of late, but at any rate you manage to keep up your work which is the greatest of consolations. I speak feelingly having had a long and severe illness last year and though better now, finding work no longer easy. In writing about the Kopis series I had better not trust to memory, but in a week or two I shall be back in Oxford and will go over them with Balfour. My impression is that the series is much or altogether on the original lines, and that the drawings go with the specimens. No doubt the geographical continuity in such series is as important as it would be to a zoological. Indeed the problem which most occupies me is to trace inventions &c from their geographical origins, especially because ideas and customs are so apt to follow the same tracks. In working out the whole course of culture, it seems to me that to follow the diffusion of such a thing as a special weapon, is to lay down the main lines of the whole process, so that I should be among those most interested in the travelling of the Kopis.

In three weeks or so you will hear from me again. I go on getting Tasmanian implements which continue to conform to the same type, with variants

yrs very tly

Edward B Tylor

Transcribed by AP for Rethinking Pitt-Rivers project June 2011