546 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



SKETCH OF GABEIEL DE MOKTILLET. 



nnilE Ecole d' Anthropologic feels with a profound emotion the 

 -*- loss of the eminent master, one of its glories, whose labors 

 have contributed in so large a measure to honor and magnify it, and 

 to extend and confirm its legitimate authority, and who had the ex- 

 ceedingly rare merit of constituting a science which by means of him 

 has become a French science — that of prehistoric archaeology." 

 Such is the eminently fitting tribute spoken by the professors of the 

 Paris Ecole d' Anthropologic through their Revue Mensuelle to the 

 memory of Gabriel de Mortillet. 



Louis Laurent Gabriel de Mortillet was born at Meylan, 

 Isere, France, August 29, 1821, and died September 25, 1898. He 

 began his studies with the Jesuits at Chambery, and continued them 

 in Paris at the Museum of Natural History and at the Conservatoire 

 des Arts et Metiers. He was interested in the revolutionary move- 

 ments of 1848; and in the insurrectionary demonstration of the 13th 

 of June, 1849, which followed the presentation by Ledru Rollin, on 

 the 11th, of a resolution of impeachment against President Louis 

 Napoleon for repressing the republican movement in Eome, it was 

 with his help that the eminent deputy was enabled to escape arrest. 

 In the same year he was condemned for a press offense and took 

 refuge in Savoy. During his exile he classified the collections of the 

 Natural History Museum in Geneva ; had charge of the arrangement 

 of the Museum at Annecy in 1854; directed an exploitation of 

 hydraulic lime in Italy; and served as geological adviser in the con- 

 struction of the northern railways of that country. He was also asso- 

 ciated with Agassiz in his studies of the glaciers of Switzerland. He 

 returned to Paris in 1864, and in 1867 was charged with the organiza- 

 tion of the first hall or prehistoric department of the History of Labor 

 at the Universal Exposition of 1867. In 1868 he was called to the 

 Museum of National Antiquities at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where he 

 continued till 1885. It is specially mentioned that he carried this 

 institution safely through the perils of the war of 1870-'71. While 

 engaged in these museum tasks he was struck with the insufficiency 

 of the then universally accepted paleontological and prehistoric 

 classifications, and his attention became fully absorbed in the subject. 

 He held long consultations with Edouard Lartet, the eminent pale- 

 ontologist and his learned friends concerning it. As a result of 

 these deliberations, after careful study of the formations and speci- 

 mens, he proposed a scheme of classification in 1869, which was 

 completed at the congress held in Brussels in 1872, and has become 

 generally accepted in its fundamentals, after having withstood the 



