As these debates were being conducted in London in the 1870s, missionaries were establishing new fields throughout the western Pacific and were forming links with metropolitan theorists, particularly Tylor and Müller.^[23] In 1875, George Brown (1835-1917), who had begun his mission career for Methodism in Samoa in 1860, was founding a new mission on the Duke of York Islands in the Bismarck Archipelago of what is now Papua New Guinea. Shortly afterwards, he began to publish articles on anthropological matters and made contact with Tylor just prior to the theorist's appointment to Oxford University as the first lecturer in Anthropology. Brown and Tylor communicated intermittently over the next twenty years (Gardner 2006a:111-27).

Brown was one of a number of missionary anthropologists familiar with metropolitan literature. He read Müller while in Samoa and was enthusiastic about Lubbock's Origin of Civilisation which he read in his final years in the Bismarck Archipelago, despite the scorn of many of his colleagues who were generally scathing about Lubbock's ethnological pastiches.^[24] Many of Brown's published articles were concerned with the debates on an ethnological division of the Pacific which he addressed most comprehensively in his book Melanesians and Polynesians (1910). Brown's response to Tylor's edited publication Notes and Queries on Anthropology (1874) reflected the symbiotic but ambivalent relationship between missionaries and contemporary anthropology. Indeed, the text itself points to the great split between the Ethnological and Anthropological Societies of London that had been resolved three years prior to its publication.^[25] Part One, entitled 'Constitution of Man', was compiled by John Beddoe (1826-1911), a former president of the racialist Anthropological Society who was then engaged in the comprehensive measuring of the British population (Stocking 1987:66). The section was exclusively concerned with physical anthropology and included questions on the 'form and size' of 'living subjects' and instructions on how to measure the human body (Tylor 1874:1‑6). While these questions might not have been abhorrent to the ornithologist in Brown, they were clearly incompatible with his Evangelical ideals of human unity. He largely ignored the section on physical anthropology except for a few terse responses that show little more than his desire to subvert the spirit of the inquiry. He was clearly more comfortable with Part Two of Notes and Queries and the questions on 'Culture' that were compiled by E.B. Tylor, long affiliated with the humanitarian Ethnological Society. Brown answered most of the questions from these sections, often with long and detailed explanations that readily agreed with the mode of investigation. He similarly refused to use physical evidence as a means of classifying difference across the putative Melanesia-Polynesia division (1887:312), arguing that the difficulties were such that the evidence was inherently unsound.

In 1889, Brown received a letter and a copy of 'Questions on the Customs and Superstitions of Savages' from James Frazer (1854-1941), then a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge.^[26] By this link, Brown was drawn into the great late-nineteenth century question regarding religious sensibility, the relationship between magic and science. Central to the debate was the anthropological term 'totemism' which was defined as the origin of erroneous magical thinking and the mechanism by which the 'lowest races' sought spiritual answers for material phenomena. From the base line of totemism, human evolution led to increasingly sophisticated religious thought and then finally to science. The implication was that, by this route, humanity was progressively freed from religious falsehood.^[27] Melanesia was proving to be a rich field in the study of the relationship between totemism and marriage classes and Frazer actively courted Brown as one who was 'intimately acquainted with the local people'.^[28] The two men corresponded over the next twenty-five years and in Totemism and Exogamy (1910), in a chapter on 'Totemism in Northern Melanesia', Frazer (1910, II:119,122-3) quoted extensively from Brown's 1877 paper on the Bismarck Archipelago as well as from Melanesians and Polynesians. To Frazer (1910, II:151), the Bismarck Archipelago offered 'pure' forms of totemism that rested easily within prescribed definitions. It also fitted the expected correlation between race and development — Melanesians had totems while Polynesian forms had purportedly 'developed' into religion. In this scheme, the Palau Islands, which were reported as having both totems and religion, provided the link between the two regions.

Frazer closed Totemism and Exogamy with his final theory that totemism originated from the failure to identify the role of the male in human conception.^[29] He based his theory on the fieldwork of the biologist Baldwin Spencer (1860-1929) and the Alice Springs postmaster Frank Gillen (1856-1912) who spent some months amongst the Aranda (now Arrernte) people of central Australia in the last years of the nineteenth century. In reply to their question, asked ad nauseum, the people told the researchers time and time again 'the child was not the direct result of intercourse' (Wolfe 1994:180). Frazer (1910, IV:61) believed that the apparent failure to attribute conception to intercourse was the source of totemism and, according to evolutionist theory, the origin of all religion:

While Brown was a keen informant for anthropological theorists, he clearly believed that Frazer's theory came too close to defining the Arrernte as a proto-religious group. His problems were twofold. First, there were political dangers for the Arrernte people implicit in such a definition. It could be argued that this period marked the high tide of European claims for Aboriginal inferiority and their anticipated extinction. Second, Brown was alert to the threat to Christianity in Frazer's suggestion that religion was little more than a long progression from an original erroneous explanatory system to the eventual triumph of science. In his response to Frazer's 'conceptional' theory in a paper to the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science (1911), Brown made pointed arguments against Frazer's findings. He held that Frazer did not properly account for a number of beliefs that would have to have been present before the 'conceptional' belief could occur: for example, there must have been a prior belief in 'totem spirits' as well as a prior belief in both a 'spirit child' who entered the mother's womb and the ability of the mother to receive the 'totem'. Brown concluded, against Frazer: 'there must, in fact, have been totems before the totemic spirit could enter the womb of the woman'. The aging missionary then made a bold statement on the unity of humankind through the faculty of faith:

Frazer's analysis troubled Brown's uneasy adherence to cultural evolutionism. He described the data as 'so abnormal and contrary to experience' that some other explanation had to be available and he concluded that Gillen and Spencer were probably missing vital information. Brown's alternative theory was that 'knowing herself to be pregnant (as all women do)' the Arrernte woman simply takes the 'necessary steps to fix the totem of her child' (1911:407-8). Therefore the two beliefs, biological conception and the entering of the 'totemic spirit' into the womb, could be held simultaneously. Brown's outburst on the religious instinct showed his unease that evolutionist speculations on the gradual development of all aspects of human ability undermined the theology of human unity. Brown maintained the place of an innate and universal capacity for belief, human reasoning, and intelligence and questioned the implication that Arrernte (and by extension other Aboriginal groups) marked the very origin and therefore the lowest level of intellectual and religious states.