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So marked has been the work of Negro artisans and traders in the manufacture and exchange of iron implements that a growing number of archeologists are disposed to-day to consider the Negro as the originator of the art of smelting iron. Gabriel de Mortillet declared Negroes the only iron users among primitive people.
At the Stockholm Congress in 1874 de Mortillet advanced the theory that megalithic monuments in different districts were due to different peoples, and that what spread was the custom of building such structures and not the builders themselves. This theory has been accepted by most archæologists, including Montelius, Salomon Reinach, Sophus Müller, Hoernes, and Déchelette.
In astronomy, Kant, Laplace, and the Herschels; in geology, Hutton, Lyell, and the Geikies; in biology, Buffon, Lamarck, the Darwins, Huxley, and Spencer; in psychology, Spencer, Romanes, Sully, and Ribot; in sociology, Spencer, Tylor, Lubbock, and De Mortillet these have been the chief evolutionary teachers and discoverers.
Following up this idea after he had visited Switzerland and without any communication with M. de Mortillet or cognisance of his views, he suggested in 1859 that the lake-basins were not of pre-glacial date, but had been scooped out by ice during the glacial period, the excavation having for the most part been effected in Miocene sandstone, provincially called, on account of its softness, "molasse."
And the conclusion arrived at by the authorities upon such matters cannot be better put than in the revised edition in book form of an article in the Revue Archeologque by Monsieur G. de Mortillet. After referring to the relics of so much of ancient Gaul as is comprised in modern France, a subject he takes leave of in the words
M. Mortillet in the same year advanced the theory that after the Alpine lake-basins had been filled up with loose fluviatile deposits, they were re-excavated by the great glaciers which passed down the valleys at the time of the greatest cold, a doctrine which would attribute to moving ice almost as great a capacity of erosion as that which assumed that the original basins were scooped out of solid rock by glaciers.
At. de Mortillet estimates at more than 25,000 the number of specimens found on the plateau of Saint Acheul, the scene of the earliest discoveries that revealed the existence of man in Quaternary times; and the station of Concise, on Lake Neuchatel, which is one of the most ancient in Switzerland, yielded a yet more considerable number.
"But the pre-Christian cult of the cross was not confined to Savoy and the environs of Lyons. A glance at the coins of ancient Gaul is sufficient to show that it existed in nearly every part" M. de Mortillet, crossing the frontier and dealing with the said tombs of Gola-Secca near Milan in Italy, sums up as follows
The contrary, earnestly maintained by M. de Mortillet, has long been the general opinion. M. Worsaae declared, at the Brussels Congress, that the dolmens were erected by different peoples; M. Cazalis de Fondouce, M. Broca, and M. Cartailhac, share this belief.
Did he forge them on Portuguese models? Or was it chance coincidence? Or was it undesigned parallelism? There is such a case according to Mortillet. M. de Mortillet flew upon poor Prof. Pigorini's odd things, denouncing them as forgeries; he had attacked Dr. Schliemann's finds in his violent way, and never apologised, to my knowledge. Then a lively squabble began.
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