An old Newcomen steam engine at North Ashton, near Bristol, England, as described by Mr. W.H. Pearson in the British Association, is still doing practical work after an active career of nearly one hundred and fifty years, it having been erected in 1750 at a cost of seventy pounds. The piston is packed with rope, and has a covering of water on the top to make it steam tight. The working of the engine is aided by the vacuum formed by the injection of water into the cylinder. The old man now engaged in working this engine has held his post since he was a lad, and his father and grandfather occupied the same position.
The excavation of the Roman town of Calleva Attrebatum at Silchester, near Reading, England, has brought to light nearly forty complete houses, a private bathing establishment, two square temples, the west gate, a Christian church possibly of the fourth century, a basilica and forum, an extensive system of dye works, a series of drains, other works, and a multitude of ornaments and utensils—remains of Roman civic life and institutions, complementing previous discoveries of Roman monuments in England, which have been mostly military.
SKETCH OF GABRIEL DE MORTILLET.
"The École d'Anthropologie feels with a profound emotion the loss of the eminent master, one of its glories, whose labors have contributed in so large a measure to honor and magnify it, and to extend and confirm its legitimate authority, and who had the exceedingly rare merit of constituting a science which by means of him has become a French science—that of prehistoric archæology." Such is the eminently fitting tribute spoken by the professors of the Paris École d'Anthropologie through their Revue Mensuelle to the memory of Gabriel de Mortillet.
Louis Laurent Gabriel de Mortillet was born at Meylan, Isère, France, August 29, 1821, and died September 25, 1898. He began his studies with the Jesuits at Chambéry, and continued them in Paris at the Museum of Natural History and at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. He was interested in the revolutionary movements of 1848; and in the insurrectionary demonstration of the 13th of June, 1849, which followed the presentation by Ledru Rollin, on the 11th, of a resolution of impeachment against President Louis Napoleon for repressing the republican movement in Rome, it was with his help that the eminent deputy was enabled to escape arrest. In the same year he was condemned for a press offense and took refuge in Savoy. During his exile he classified the collections of the Natural History Museum in Geneva; had charge of the arrangement of the Museum at Annecy in 1854; directed an exploitation of hydraulic lime in Italy; and served as geological adviser in the construction of the northern railways of that country. He was also associated with Agassiz in his studies of the glaciers of Switzerland. He returned to Paris in 1864, and in 1867 was charged with the organization of the first hall or prehistoric department of the History of Labor at the Universal Exposition of 1867. In 1868 he was called to the Museum of National Antiquities at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where he continued till 1885. It is specially mentioned that he carried this institution safely through the perils of the war of 1870-'71. While engaged in these museum tasks he was struck with the insufficiency of the then universally accepted paleontological and prehistoric classifications, and his attention became fully absorbed in the subject. He held long consultations with Edouard Lartet, the eminent paleontologist and his learned friends concerning it. As a result of these deliberations, after careful study of the formations and specimens, he proposed a scheme of classification in 1869, which was completed at the congress held in Brussels in 1872, and has become generally accepted in its fundamentals, after having withstood the 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 synthesize 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'Anthropologie 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. "In all these important positions," says Dr. Capitan in his eulogy, "de Mortillet unfailingly brought a uniform ardor to his work, a uniform activity, a clear and acute wit, and a remarkable precision. He performed his numerous duties almost to the end of his life. Only last month (July, 1898) he made another journey for the execution of a mission which the commission on megalithic monuments had intrusted to him."