Boucher de Crèvecoeur de Perthes, JACQUES

Boucher de Crèvecoeur de Perthes, JACQUES, anthropologist and writer, born at Réthel, 10th September 1788. Through his father, an active botanist, he came under the notice of Napoleon, and was employed in numerous missions to Italy, Germany, Austria, and Hungary. From the Restoration he lived at Abbeville, and there he died, 5th August 1868. He wrote travels, poems, and an early apology for free-trade; but only his works on the archaeology of man are of consequence now. The first, De la Creation (5 vols. 1839-41), already brought him some reputation, but his long investigations on stone weapons and other remains of early human civilisation in the tertiary and older quaternary diluvial strata made him famous. His most striking discovery was that of a fossil human jawbone in the quarries of Moulin-Quignon, near Abbeville, in 1863. Other works of great value are Antiquités Celtiques et Antédiluviennes (3 vols. 1846-65), and De l'Homme Antédiluvien et de ses Œuvres (1860).