Henry Balfour

In 1884, the University of Oxford accepted the collection of ethnological and archaeological specimens made and arranged by General Augustus Pitt Rivers.

Specimens of the arts and crafts of various peoples had long been collected in museums and were regarded as little more than curiosities or trophies, but owing to the work of Colonel Lane-Fox they acquired a new significance.

In 1851 Augustus H. Lane Fox (later Pitt Rivers) began to collect specimens of firearms to illustrate his recognition that every noteworthy advancement in the efficiency, not only of the weapon but also of every individual detail in its structure, was arrived at as a cumulative result of a succession of very slight modifications, each of which was but a trifling improvement upon the one immediately preceding it.

The validity of the general views of Colonel Lane Fox as to the evolution of the material arts of man was rapidly accepted by a large number of ethnologists and others.

Balfour stated in his Presidential Address to the Somersetshire Archaeological and Natural History Society in 1919: Arguing from the known to the unknown, ese modern survivals of early cultures have been used, as far as possible, to complete the picture of the life and industries of Prehistoric Man.

From the combined material derived from ancient and modern times series were created to show, tentatively at any rate, how the more developed types of appliances were arrived at by successive slight improvements from their simple and generalized prototypes.

Incidentally these typological series serve to demonstrate the geographical distribution of particular arts, industries, and appliances, a matter which is becoming recognized as increasingly important, as affording valuable clues to the intricate problems of racial dispersal and migration routes, and as supplying evidence of the culture-contact between various peoples not necessarily related to one another.Balfour went on to say, "In studying the development of human arts, it must not be supposed that progress was effected by a simple process of what is known as 'end-on' evolution, the successive morphological changes following one another in simple unilinear series".

Although he only wrote one book, The Evolution of Decorative Art (1893), Balfour published numerous scholarly articles, often taking a specific type of object – from musical bows to fire-pistons or fishing-kites – and exploring its "evolutionary development" through history and across different cultures.