his Australian contemporaries became apparent to British anthropologists. Northcote W. Thomas observed in 1906 that Mathews had written "numerous articles", all of which had "either been ignored or dismissed in a footnote by experts such as Dr. Howitt and Prof. Baldwin Spencer". In 1907 Mathews published a critique of Howitt and Spencer in Nature in which he complained that Howitt had consistently overlooked his own work. Considering it too prominent a forum to ignore, Howitt wrote a rejoinder and thus engaged in dialogue with Mathews for the first time. Howitt made the unlikely claim that he had only ever seen two publications by Mathews "neither of which recommended itself to me by its accuracy". Mathews replied, questioning the veracity of this assertion. Mathews and Howitt subsequently debated each other at greater length in American Antiquarian. Howitt was by this time mortally ill. His final contribution to anthropology, written on his death bed, was a denunciation of Mathews titled "A Message to Anthropologists". It was posthumously printed as a circular letter by members of the Howitt family and posted to a list of anthropological luminaries that included Henri Hubert, Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Arnold van Gennep, Franz Boas, Prince Roland Bonaparte and Carl Lumholtz. It was also published in Revue des Études Ethnographiques et Sociologiques. Martin Thomas argues that "A Message to Anthropologists" did significant damage to Mathews' reputation. Impact Thomas notes that professional anthropologists have often been cautious in acknowledging the contribution of their "amateur" forebears. Mathews had few champions among academic anthropologists until A. P. Elkin became interested in his work. In an obituary of Alfred Radcliffe-Brown dated 1956, Elkin declared that Mathews' work on Australian kinship marked a significant intellectual breakthrough. He listed eleven key achievements in the field of kinship study, including Mathews' realisation that the totemic heroes "were related to one another in the same kinship manner as human beings were related: in other words, that they were part of the same social order." More controversially, Elkin argued that anyone "familiar with Radcliffe-Brown's writings on this subject since 1913 will realise the extent to which he used Mathews's concepts and generalisations." Elkin claimed Radcliffe-Brown was familiar with Mathews's writings but, regarding him as an amateur, "underestimated his ability for careful recording and sound generalisation. This, however, did not prevent him adopting the results of much which Mathews had accomplished." Twenty years later, Elkin built substantially on