LETRONNE, Jean Antoine (1787-1848), French archaeologist, was born at Paris on January 2, 1787. His father, a poor engraver, having chosen the profession of an artist for him, sent him to the studio of David, but his own tastes drew him towards literature, and he became a student in the Collège de France, where it is said he used to exercise his already strongly developed faculty of critical divination by correcting for his own amusement old and bad texts of Greek authors, afterwards comparing the results he had thus obtained 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 Terrεe of Dicuil, along with a restored text. In 1815 he was appointed by Government to complete the translation of Strabo (1805-1819) 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 College de France. This chair he exchanged in 1838 for that of archaeology, and in 1840 he succeeded Daunou as keeper of the national archives. Meanwhile he had published, among other works, Considerations generales sur l’évaluation des monnaies grecques et romaines et sur la valeur de Vor et de Vargent avant la découverte de l’Amérique (1817), ...