Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, February 1899: Volume LIV, No. 4, February 1899Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, February 1899: Volume LIV, No. 4, February 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
Edouard Lartet, the eminent paleontologist and his learned friends
concerning it. As a result of these deliberations, after careful study
of the formations and specimens, 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 often-repeated attacks of
persistent criticism, and has received confirmation after confirmation
from innumerable discoveries made throughout the world. "Had his
activity concerned only the classification 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 synthesize numerous 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 International
Congress of Prehistoric Archæology. He was one of the first professors
in the École d'Anthropologie founded by Broca in 1875, the greatest
achievement, as he writes in the preface to his _Formation de la
Nation française_, of the Association for the Teaching of
Anthropological Sciences. The school was opened in November, 1875, in
a building gratuitously lent it by the École de Médecine, to give
instruction free of tuition charges, and was to be maintained 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.
Capitan said in his memorial address, "and up to this time (1897) 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
sentence that one of the characteristics attributed to him in the
short biography published in Vaporeau's _Dictionnaire Universel des
Contemporains_ 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 École, de Mortillet "gave precious instruction to numerous
students, many of whom, foreigners, have in their turns become masters
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