SKETCH OF GABRIEL I)E MORTILLET. 547 



often-repeated attacks of persistent criticism, and has received con- 

 firmation after confirmation from innumerable discoveries made 

 throughout the world. " Had his activity concerned only the classi- 

 fication of the different stone ages," says Dr. Capitan, whose eulogy of 

 M. de Mortillet we follow most largely in our sketch, " de Mortillet 

 would for that work alone have been by good right considered a great 

 man of science. Actually to illuminate a number of dark points, to 

 group a thousand scattered facts in regular order, to synthetize numer- 

 ous isolated researches, to constitute a cohesive theory of them — that 

 is what de Mortillet did. Thus he became long ago the uncontested 

 master, the leader of a school, who was able to group and hold around 

 him the scientific students and workers of the entire world." 



M. de Mortillet was in 1866 one of the founders of the Inter- 

 national Congress of Prehistoric Archaeology. He was one of the 

 first professors in the Ecole d' Anthropologic founded by Broca in 

 1875, the greatest achievement, as he writes in the preface to his 

 Formation de la Nation frangaise, of the Association for the Teach- 

 ing of Anthropological Sciences. The school was opened in Novem- 

 ber, 1875, in a building gratuitously lent it by the Ecole de Mede- 

 cine, to give instruction free of tuition charges, and was to be main- 

 tained by a fund subscribed by anthropological societies and private 

 persons, a gift of fifteen hundred dollars a year by M. Wallon for 

 laboratory purposes, and a grant of twenty-five hundred dollars from 

 the Municipal Council of Paris for the payment of professors' salaries. 

 Five courses of lectures were to be delivered, to be increased as the 

 resources of the association multiplied. The association and the 

 school were recognized as of public utility by a law of 1889; the 

 school being the first establishment of private instruction, Dr. Capi- 

 tan said in his memorial address, "and up to this time (1 8 9 7) ♦ the 

 only one that has had that honor, an honor that creates duties for us. 

 We are under obligation to clarify and extend our teaching." De 

 Mortillet's work was so true to the sentiment expressed in this sen- 

 tence that one of the characteristics attributed to him in the short 

 biography published in Vaporeau's Dictionnaire TJniversel des Con- 

 temporains is that he was one of the men who contributed most to the 

 popularizing of prehistoric studies in France. During the more than 

 twenty years of his professorship of prehistoric anthropology in the 

 Ecole, de Mortillet " gave precious instruction to numerous students, 

 many of whom, foreigners, have in their turns become masters in their 

 own countries." He was also president of the Society of Anthro- 

 pology, subdirector of the Ecole d' Anthropologic, president of the 

 Association for Teaching Anthropological Sciences, and president of 

 the Commission on Megalithic Monuments — the various functions 

 of which offices he filled with remarkable exactness and distinction. 



