Johann Schmeltz

In 1863 Schmeltz became "Kustos" or senior curator of the Museum Godeffroy in Hamburg, which specialised in the natural history and ethnography of the South Seas.

His main business was to transfer all the natural and ethnographic material, which had been collected, to the accordant university departments for identification.

By then an authority on the ethnography of the Pacific islands he left Hamburg in 1882 to become the conservator of the Rijks Ethnographisch Museum in Leiden.

Schmeltz was one of the founders and editor of Internationales Archiv für Ethnographie (Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in Leiden, 1888-1968), an anthropological journal.

These were lists with descriptions of duplicate (Doubletten) natural history specimens and artifacts offered to private collectors or other museums.