Professor John Macmillan Brown, M.A., Chancellor of the Uni-University of New Zealand, who died in Christchurch at the age of eighty-nine, on January 18th of this year, will live in the Dominion's history as the greatest pioneer of education in these islands, and as a vigorous and tireless rover of the Pacific in the cause of scientific enquiry. He was closely identified with the Canterbury University College from its foundation, and he left a fortune for the establishment there of a School of Pacific Islands Studies. He was an English and classical scholar of high attainments, and he was a keen investigator in the field of anthropological research in Polynesia and other parts of the Pacific. He was an eloquent speaker and writer, a philosopher, and an earnest advocate of the claims of higher education for all.

The late Professor Macmillan Brown was emphatically one of those men who leave the country the better for their presence in it. He was not only a great educationist and a leader in the arts and sciences, but he was a warm-hearted humanist, whose thought was ever for the advancement of his fellows in the knowledge and the culture that make a nation great. He saw beyond his time; he was a prophet and a guide; and from his death-bed he spoke his last words of counsel and warning to the people; his last address as Chancellor of the University of New Zealand was read on his behalf in the Senate only a few hours before he died.

For sixty years he had been a leader in scholarship and progressive thought in New Zealand; and his last thought was for the advancement of those studies which should be peculiarly the province of this country at the gates of the wide Pacific.