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Rh 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 synthetize 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'Anthropologic 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 in their own countries." He was also president of the Society of Anthropology, subdirector of the École d'Anthropologie, 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.