Paul Broca.
In 1847 he was appointed to serve on a Commission to report on some excavations in the cemetery of the Celestins, and this led him to study craniology, and thence to ethnology, in which his interest, once aroused, never flagged. The story of the formation of the Société d’anthropologie de Paris (1859) and of l’École d’anthropologie (1876), of both of which Broca was the moving spirit, affords a curious commentary on the suspicion in which Anthropology was held. To the success of the School he devoted all his energies, and during many years of anxiety he met and overcame all obstacles, surmounted all difficulties, wore down all opposition, and finally placed it in a secure position. He invented several instruments for the more accurate study of craniology, such as the occipital crochet, goniometer, and stereograph, and also standardised methods; but, dissatisfied with the inconclusiveness of mere cranial comparisons, he turned towards the end of his life to the study of the brain. He was an indefatigable worker, and his sudden death in his fifty-sixth year is attributed to cerebral exhaustion.
“Broca was a man,” said Dr. Beddoe, “who positively radiated science and the love of science; no one could associate with him without catching a portion of the sacred flame. Topinard has been the Elisha of this Elijah.”[[24]]
[24]. Anniversary Address, Anth. Inst., 1891.
Topinard.
Paul Topinard, pupil, colleague, and friend of Broca, made valuable investigations on the living population of France, besides devoting much time to anthropometrical studies; but his greatest service has been the preparation and publication of l’Anthropologie (1876), a guide for students and a manual of reference for travellers and others, voicing the idea of Broca and his school, and “elucidating in a single volume a series of vast dimensions, in process of rapid development.” In 1885 he published his classic Eléments d’anthropologie générale,[[25]] which aimed at creating a new atmosphere for the science, breaking free from the traditions of the monogenists and polygenists, and incorporating the new ideas spread by Darwin and Haeckel.
[25]. General Anthropology, according to Topinard’s classification, is concerned merely with man as an animal, and deals with anatomy and physiology, pathology, and psychology.
De Quatrefages.
Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau (1810-92) was not only a distinguished zoologist, occupying himself mainly with certain groups of marine animals, but also Professor of Anthropology at the Paris Museum of Natural History, and undertook several voyages along the coasts of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic in search of information. In 1867 he published Rapport sur le progrès de l’Anthropologie, “which reduces to a complete and intelligible system the abstruse and difficult, and, to many, the incomprehensible science of anthropology, embracing during his investigations a wide range of topics, and arranging disjointed facts in due order, so as at once to evince their bearing upon the subject.”[[26]] He published many other works, among them Les Pygmées (1887), L’espèce humaine (1877), Histoire générale des races humaines (1889), and, together with E. T. Hamy, the famous Crania ethnica (1875-79). Professor F. Starr, in the preface to his translation of The Pygmies (1895), says:—
[26]. Anth. Rev., 1869, p. 231.