LETHARGY (Gr. ληθαργία, from λήθη, forgetfulness), drowsiness, torpor. In pathology the term is used of a morbid condition of deep and lasting sleep from which the sufferer can be with difficulty and only temporarily aroused. The term Negro or African lethargy was formerly applied to the disease now generally known as “sleeping sickness” (q.v.).
LETHE (“Oblivion”), in Greek mythology, the daughter of Eris (Hesiod, Theog. 227) and the personification of forgetfulness. It is also the name of a river in the infernal regions. Those initiated in the mysteries were taught to distinguish two streams in the lower world, one of memory and one of oblivion. Directions for this purpose, written on a gold plate, have been found in a tomb at Petilia, and near Lebadeia, at the oracle of Trophonius, which was counted an entrance to the lower world, the two springs Mnemosyne and Lethe were shown (Pausanias ix. 39. 8). This thought begins to appear in literature in the end of the 5th century B.C., when Aristophanes (Frogs, 186) speaks of the plain of Lethe. Plato (Rep. x.) embodies the idea in one of his finest myths.
LE TRÉPORT, a maritime town of northern France in the department of Seine-Inférieure, on the English Channel, at the mouth of the Bresle, 114 m. N.N.W. of Paris on the Northern railway. Pop. (1906) 4619. Owing to its nearness to the capital, Le Tréport is a favourite watering-place of the Parisians. A good view is obtained from Mont Huon, which rises to the south-west of the town. The mouth of the Bresle forms a small port, comprising an outer tidal harbour and an inner dock accessible to vessels drawing from 13 to 16 ft. The fisheries and oyster parks with their dependent industries, shipbuilding and glass manufacture, furnish the chief occupations of the inhabitants. Coal, timber, ice and jute are imported; articles de Paris, sugar, &c., are exported. The chief buildings are the church of St Jacques (16th century), which has finely carved vaulting and good modern stained glass, and the casino erected 1896-1897. About 1 m. north-east of Le Tréport is the small bathing resort of Mers. The Eu-Tréport canal, uniting the two towns, has a length of about 3 m., and is navigable by vessels drawing 14 ft. Le Tréport (the ancient Ulterior Portus) was a port of some note in the middle ages and suffered from the English invasions. Louis Philippe twice received Queen Victoria here.
LETRONNE, JEAN ANTOINE (1787-1848), French archaeologist, was born at Paris on the 25th of January 1787. His father, a poor engraver, sent him to study art under the painter David, but his own tastes were literary, and he became a student in the Collège de France, where it is said he used to exercise his already strongly developed critical faculty by correcting for his own amusement old and bad texts of Greek authors, afterwards comparing the results with the latest and most approved editions. From 1810 to 1812 he travelled in France, Switzerland and Italy, and on his return to Paris published an Essai critique sur la topographie de Syracuse (1812), designed to elucidate Thucydides. Two years later appeared his Recherches géographiques et critiques on the De Mensura Orbis Terrae of Dicuil. In 1815 he was commissioned by government to complete the translation of Strabo which had been begun by Laporte-Dutheil, and in March 1816 he was one of those who were admitted to the Academy of Inscriptions by royal ordinance, having previously contributed a Mémoire, “On the Metrical System of the Egyptians,” which had been crowned. Further promotion came rapidly; in 1817 he was appointed director of the École des Chartes, in 1819 inspector-general of the university, and in 1831 professor of history in the Collège de France. This chair he exchanged in 1838 for that of archaeology, and in 1840 he succeeded Pierre C. François Daunou (1761-1840) as keeper of the national archives. Meanwhile he had published, among other works, Considérations générales sur l’évaluation des monnaies grecques et romaines et sur la valeur de l’or et de l’argent avant la découverte de l’Amérique (1817), Recherches pour servir à l’histoire d’Égypte pendant la domination des Grecs et des Romains (1823), and Sur l’origine grecque des zodiaques prétendus égyptiens (1837). By the last-named he finally exploded a fallacy which had up to that time vitiated the chronology of contemporary Egyptologists. His Diplômes et Chartres de l’époque Mérovingienne sur papyrus et sur vélin were published in 1844. The most important work of Letronne is the Recueil des inscriptions grecques et latines de l’Égypte, of which the first volume appeared in 1842, and the second in 1848. He died at Paris on the 14th of December 1848.