Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/77

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ANTHROPOLOGICAL WORK IN EUROPE.
67

In America no French anthropologist is so well known as A. de Quatrefages, whose Human Species and Natural History of Man are here widely read. Up to the very date of his death, early in the present year, the old man lived among his books and kept at work, although he was in his eighty-second year. A zoölogist by training, he was one of the few prominent workers in that field who held out against Darwinism and other forms of transformist doctrine. His writings have been of the greatest importance. With his assistant naturalist, Dr. Hainy, he wrote Crania Ethnica, a standard work on the characteristics of race as shown in skulls. His Migration of the Polynesians, Fossil and Savage Men, and the Pygmies, are others of his works that are well known. De Quatrefages was officially connected with the Museum of Natural History, and under his directorship much of the material in the Galerie d'Anthropologie was gathered, and the Laboratory of Anthropology of the museum, perhaps the best equipped and most convenient in the world, was established. This laboratory is situated near the house where De Quatrefages Prof. G. de Mortillet. lived (which was, by the way, the home of Buffon). It contains office-rooms for the corps of workers, Doctors Hamy, Vérneau, and Delisle. Two large rooms are supplied with tables, instruments, and materials for the use of students. An excellent dark room for photographic work, rooms for preparation of material, for modeling and casting in plaster, are all provided. A fair library for reference is also connected with the laboratory. The Galerie d'Anthropologie of the museum contains a vast quantity of varied and interesting material, probably the greatest collection in the world. Thirteen rooms are too small for its suitable display. Over two thousand skulls belonging to the collection are packed away for lack of space for them in the cases. One of the rooms is devoted to fossil men, and here are many original pieces of great value and world-famous, such as the Cro-Magnon skulls and the Mentone skeleton.