full professor in 1939 and remained at Yale for another twenty-one years. During World War II, he took leave to serve as lieutenant commander (1943-45) and commander (1945-46) in the U.S. Naval Reserve. In 1960 he accepted appointment as Andrew Mellon Professor of social anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. After retiring from there in 1973 at age seventy-five, he and Carmen moved to Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, in suburban Philadelphia, to be near their only child, Robert, and his family. They remained there until Carmen's death, after which Murdock moved to a retirement home in nearby Devon, where he died.

Murdock's scientific career was marked by a remarkable consistency. From his boyhood love of geography came a lasting interest in ethnography on a world-wide basis, in the knowledge of which he was without equal. He did not accept the theories of Sumner and Keller in regard to social evolution, but he shared their conviction that a scientific approach to the study of society and culture required systematic comparative, cross-cultural study. Much of his career was devoted to creating organized data archives intended to establish a solid foundation for such study.

In this, as in everything else he did, Murdock sought to bring better order to the enormous mass of ethnographic information and to the many conflicting and competing generalizations, hypotheses, and typologies that anthropologists were continually generating but failing to test empirically in a rigorous way. He seemed compelled to bring tidiness to things so that the problems could be clarified, and what needed to be done could be more clearly seen and progress made in the accumulation and improvement of knowledge.

Changing fashions in intellectual posture did not appeal to Murdock except as they demonstrably led to new kinds of verifiable knowledge. He did not try to create new theory