BROCA, PAUL-PIERRE. — French surgeon, naturalist, and anthropologist, b. at Ste-Foy-la-Grande on 28 June 1824, d. in Paris on 9 July 1880. In 1859 he founded the Société d'Anthropologie and in 1876 the Ecole d'Anthropologie. An evolutionist and agnostic. He left a vigorous lecture of 1870 «on transformism» in which he demonstrates that the so-called theory of organic evolution is essentially a philosophical interpretation that agnosticism is compelled to give of the origin of living beings, and not a doctrine reached by induction.
BIBL.: P. Broca. Revue des cours scientifiques, 34 (1870), p. 530 ff.; id., Mémoires d'Anthropologie, III, Parigi 1877, p. 141 ff. Luigi Seremin