1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mortillet, Louis Laurent Gabriel de

MORTILLET, LOUIS LAURENT GABRIEL DE (1821–1898), French anthropologist, was born at Meylau, Isere, on the 29th of August 1821. He was educated at the Jesuit college of Chambéry and at the Paris Conservatoire. Becoming in 1847 proprietor of La Revue indépendante, he was implicated in the Revolution of 1848 and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. He fled the country and during the next fifteen years lived abroad, chiefly in Italy. In 1858 he turned his attention to ethnological research, making a special study of the Swiss lake-dwellings. He returned to Paris in 1864, and soon afterwards was appointed curator of the museum at St. Germain. He became mayor of the town, and in 1885 he was elected deputy for Seine-et-Oise. He had meantime founded a review, Matériaux pour l’histoire positive et philosophique de l’homme, and in conjunction with Broca assisted to found the French School of Anthropology. He died at St Germain-en-Laye on the 25th of September 1898. Of his published works the best known are Le Préhistorique (1882); Origines de la chasse, de la pêche et de l’agriculture (1890); Les Nègres et la civilisation égyptienne (1884).