A PROFESSOR'S TOUR

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 149, 21 December 1926, Page 10

A PROFESSOR'S TOUR

VISIT TO ENGLAND AN© THE EAST.

Professor B. Macmillan Brown, Chancellor 'of tha University of New Zealand, returned to-day after a seven months' visit to England and tho East. While in England he attended the fiveyearly congress of delegates from British universities in all parts of the Empire, held at Cambridge. For two months in England he was engaged in revising the proofs of his-new book, "Peoples and Problems of, the Pacific," a volume which he'was eneoufaged by hia publishers to compile following upon the success of hia former work, "Tho Riddle of the Pacific", Professor Brown was also • invited by* Professor Sakurai, manager of the PanPacific Science Congress, which, meets once in every three years, to attend the gathering held this year at Tokio, and he made the trip to the East via Canada. From Tokio he went on to Hong Kong and Shanghai before returning to New Zealand via Australia.

While. s!n Hong Kong Brof essor Brown wan invited to lunch with the leaders of. tha floating American University, and he spoke upon the absence of university training in governors, residents, and judges administering the various primitive peoples included in the Empire, whom he considered should be trained in the ethnology of the region they.were to control. Appointees also should have a bent towards the study of primitive customs. "Unfortunately," said Professor Brown in an interview to-day, "I said that twenty years ago I had been in German Samoa and had seen how interested the German officials there were in the ethnology of Samoa. Sir Francis Lugard and Sir. Matthew Nathan, once Governor of Hong Kong and more recently Governor of Queensland, objected to my comparison, and said that the British officials were always sympathetic with primitive peoples. My reply was that sympathy did not come to much if it was not backed hy knowledge."

Professor Brown said that the delegates to the science congress were treated ia Japan with unbounded courtesy. They were boarded in the Imperial Hotel, and wherever, they went they had free passage on the railways and by tram, and free taxis to any entertainment they had to attend. There was entertainment every day, if not every night as well. In fact, he thought the entertainment atmosphere of the congress was apt,to smother the actual business. Trips were provided all over Japan for the 150 delegates.