African Art at the Royal Scottish Museum

Abstract

of widespread public interest in manufactured products and was intended to be a museum of the industry of the world. This aim was interpreted in the widest sense, and as a result the collections of the museum developed to include not only technology and science but also geology, natural history, decorative arts, and ethnography of the world. Although active collecting began in 1855, part of the holdings was formed earlier, having originally belonged to a museum begun by the University of Edinburgh in the eighteenth century. This museum had traditionally been the responsibility of the professor of natural history and much of the collection was zoological, but some ethnographical material was included, largely from the Pacific and the Americas, with a few early nineteenth-century items from West Africa. The first director of the Industrial Museum of Scotland, George Wilson, was a man of enormous energy and foresight. A doctor by training, he devoted himself to gathering examples of industrial arts from all over the world. Wilson recognized the importance of illustrating the history of industrial processes and also stressed the need to acquire comparative material from less-civilised nations: he was anxious to