Samples of textiles he brought home from the Ottoman Empire provided the idea for looped cotton towelling, taken up by his brother Richard, and amenable to mechanical manufacture with a technique devised by an employee, Samuel Holt.

With committee members Robert Forster and Samuel Fox, he also lobbied the government for practical help in improving Irish fisheries.

[8] In 1857 he visited, with Lord Althorp and John W. Probyn, the Elgin settlement of free blacks in Ontario, writing afterwards to its founder William King, and giving money.

[14] He was also a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and sponsored the application for membership there of Augustus Lane Fox (later Pitt Rivers), the other major British collector of the time in the ethnographic field.

Among the fruits of his first expedition to the East were an extensive collection of Eastern fabrics, and a large series of figures from Cyprus, which are now in the British Museum.

[2] In 1858, the antiquity of man was proved by the discoveries of Boucher de Perthes on flint implements in France; Christy joined the Geological Society that year.

In April 1865, Christy left England with a small party of geologists to examine some caves which had recently been discovered in Belgium, near Dinant.

[16] He also left £5000 which established the Christy fund that allowed the British Museum to purchase many more artefacts;[17] with a sum of money to be applied to public exhibition.

In that year the removal of the natural history department to South Kensington made room for the collection at the British Museum.

[18] In 1864 he wrote an account of the work which was being carried out at his expense in the Vézère Valley; these notices appeared in the Comptes rendus (29 February 1864) and Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London (21 June 1864).