LOUIS

See also:

• LAURENT, FRANCOIS (1810–1887)

LAURENT

See also:

• GABRIEL (Heb. SKns, man of God)

GABRIEL DE

See also:

• LOUIS LAURENT GABRIEL DE MORTILLET (1821-1898)

MORTILLET (1821-1898)  , French anthropologist, was born at Meylau, Isere, on the 29th of August 1821 . He was educated at the Jesuit college of Chambery and at the Paris Conservatoire . Becoming in 1847 proprietor of La Revue independante, 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, Materiaux 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 Prehistorique (1882); Origines de la chasse, de la petche et de l'agriculture (189o); Les Negres et la civilisation egyptienne (1884) .