DEATH OF SCIENTIST

Taranaki Daily News, 23 July 1929, Page 3

DEATH OF SCIENTIST

SIR BALDWIN SPENCER.

AUTHORITY ON ETHNOLOGY.

New York, July 19.

News has just been received from Buenos Aires that Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer, who was a member of a scientific expedition which is studying the life and customs of the natives, has died at Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego.

Ushuaia is a village on the island of Tierra del ’ Fuego, south of Patagonia, one of the islands of which Cape Horn is the southernmost. The native inhabitants are of a very primitive type. Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer was from 1887 to 1919 professor of biology in the University of Melbourne. He was born in Lancashire in 1860, and was at Owens College and Oxford University. He be-o-an the study of the primitive inhabitants of Australia in 1893, and conducted four expeditions into Central Australia. He was the greatest living authority on the aborigines. He was formerly special commissioner to the Northern Territory and chief protector of the aborigines. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society. He published reports and descriptions of his explorations and many other scientific papers on the native tribes. He once travelled along the telegraph lino from Alice Springs to Darwin, and on another occasion went chiefly on foot to the Gulf of Carpentaria. . He was president of the National Museum, Melbourne, and vice-president of the National Library. He was president of the Victorian Football League, and when he came to Melbourne University in 1887 he founded the University Sports Union and established the first university football club. . The Royal Anthropological Institute awarded the Rivers Memorial Medal to Sir Baldwin in March, 1928, in recognition of his researches into the ethnology of the Australian aborigines.