1915 deaths

Jean-Henri Casimir Fabre (21 December 1823 – 11 October 1915) was a French naturalist, entomologist, and author known for the lively style of his popular books on the lives of insects.

Colonel Marie Augstin Gaston Cros (known as Gaston Cros) (6 October 1861 – 10 May 1915) was a French army officer and archaeologist. He was born in Alsace and was displaced when that territory was incorporated into the German Empire. He joined the French Army as a lieutenant and saw action in Tonkin before spending several years surveying in Tunisia, receiving the honours of membership of Vietnamese and Tunisian orders and appointment as a chevalier of the Legion of Honour. In 1901 Cros was appointed head of the French archaeological expedition to Girsu, Iraq to continue the work of Ernest de Sarzec. His work over the next five years included the tracing of the 32.5 feet (9.9 m) thick city wall and for his work there received a letter of commendation from Gaston Doumergue, the Minister of Fine Arts, and the award of the Golden Palms of the Ordre des Palmes Académiques. Promoted to lieutenant-colonel, Cros served in the French protectorate of Morocco from 1913, seeing action in the Zaian War.
Upon the outbreak of the First World War Cros was recalled to metropolitan France and fought in defence of Paris at the First Battle of the Marne, leading an ad hoc unit of zouaves and tirailleurs. He was wounded and spent two days directing his troops from a horse-drawn carriage before he was forced to leave his command. On 15 September 1914 he was promoted to colonel and subsequently received command of the 2nd Moroccan Brigade which he led at the Battle of the Yser and the Second Battle of Artois. It was at Artois that he was killed in a German counter-attack. Cros' name is recorded alongside that of Colonel Pein, who commanded the 1st Moroccan Brigade at Artois, on the Moroccan Division Memorial at Vimy.

Charles Jacques Bouchard (6 September 1837 – 28 October 1915) was a French pathologist and an esperantist born in Montier-en-Der, a commune the department of Haute-Marne.

Charles-Joseph Pigeon (29 March 1838 – 18 March 1915) was born in Le Mesnil-Lieubray in Normandy in France.
He started as a salesman in Le Bon Marché in Paris, where he became a close friend of Ernest Cognacq, subsequently the founder of the Samaritaine department store.
Pigeon became a dealer in cycle lamps and other lamps. His invention and manufacture of the Pigeon lamp, a non-exploding gasoline lamp, in 1884 (exhibited at the Exposition universelle de 1900), made him famous and wealthy.

After his death he remains noted for his family grave in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, which he commissioned in 1905 to hold up to 18 family members. The main feature is a life-sized bronze sculpture of Pigeon (notebook and pencil in hand) and his wife lying on a bed, overlooked by an angel, which had been illuminated by a lamp for many years by his custodians.

Pierre-Émile Martin (French: [pjɛʁ emil maʁtɛ̃]; 18 August 1824, Bourges, Cher – 23 May 1915, Fourchambault) was a French industrial engineer. He applied the principle of recovery of the hot gas in an open hearth furnace, a process invented by Carl Wilhelm Siemens.
In 1865, based on the Siemens process, he implemented the process which bears his name for producing steel in a hearth by remelting scrap steel with the addition of cast iron for the dilution of impurities.
His work earned him the award of the Bessemer Gold Medal of the Iron and Steel Institute in 1915 and of the French nation (knight in 1878 then Officer of the Legion of Honour in 1910).

Albert Weisgerber (21 April 1878 – 10 May 1915) was a German painter whose work forms a bridge between Impressionism and early Expressionism.

Léopold Louis-Dreyfus (5 March 1833 – 9 April 1915) was a French businessman, diplomat, and investor who was best known as the founder of the Louis Dreyfus Group, and patriarch of the Louis-Dreyfus family.
The French government awarded him the title Commander of the Legion of Honour in 1912.

Eduard Sonnenburg (3 November 1848, in Bremen – 25 May 1915, in Bad Wildungen) was a German surgeon. He was a son-in-law to neurologist Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal.
After receiving his medical doctorate in 1872, he spent several years as an assistant to Georg Albert Lücke at the surgical clinic in Strassburg. In 1876 he qualified as a lecturer of surgery at the university. In 1880 he relocated to Berlin, where he worked under Bernhard von Langenbeck and Ernst von Bergmann.In 1883 he became an associate professor at the University of Berlin, and in 1890 was appointed director of the surgical department at the Krankenhaus Moabit. In 1913 he became an honorary full professor at the university.In 1886, he was a founding member of the Freie Vereinigung der Chirurgen Berlins (Free Association of Berlin Surgeons), an organization known today as the Berliner Chirurgische Gesellschaft. His name is associated with "Sonnenberg's sign", an indicator defined as bloody leukocytosis seen in appendicitis with localized peritonitis. He standardized Appendectomy, i.e. the surgery removing the vermiform appendix and was invited to perform the surgery for many nobles and royalties in Europe.

Édouard Ernest Prillieux (11 January 1829 in Paris – 7 October 1915 in Mondoubleau) was a French botanist and agronomist known for his work with plant diseases.
He took courses at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle as a pupil of Adrien-Henri de Jussieu and Adolphe-Théodore Brongniart, then from 1850 studied botany at the Institut national agronomique in Versailles under Pierre Étienne Simon Duchartre. For a number of years afterwards he served in various functions at the Sorbonne and at the natural history museum. From 1874 he taught classes at the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, and in 1876 was named a professor of botany and plant physiology at the agronomic institute. In 1887 he became director of the Station de Pathologie végétale in Paris.In 1876 he was chosen as president of the Société nationale d'agriculture, and in 1883 became inspector general of agricultural education. In 1897 he replaced Charles Victor Naudin at the French Academy of Sciences (botanical section). From 1897 to 1906 he served as a senator representing the department of Loir-et-Cher.The mycological genera Prillieuxia (Sacc. & Syd., 1899) and Prillieuxina (G.Arnaud, 1918) commemorate his name.

Ambrosius Arnold Willem Hubrecht (2 March 1853, in Rotterdam – 21 March 1915, in Utrecht) was a Dutch zoologist.
Hubrecht studied zoology at Utrecht University with Harting and Donders, for periods joining Selenka in Leiden and later Erlangen, and Gegenbauer in Heidelberg. He graduated magna cum laude with Harting in 1874 with a study on nemertine worms. In 1875–1882 he worked at the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie in Leiden, where he was the curator of ichthyology and herpetology, and in 1882 became professor at Utrecht. In 1890–1891 he traveled in Java, Sumatra, and Borneo, where he made embryological studies, notably on the tarsier. He visited the United States in 1896 and 1907. Honorary degrees were conferred on him by Princeton University, the University of St Andrews, the University of Dublin, the University of Glasgow (LL.D 1901), and the University of Giessen.
Hubrecht´s most important work was in embryology and placentation of the mammals. In papers in the Quarterly Journal of Microscopial Science in 1883 and 1887 he put forth the theory—also held by Sir E. Ray Lankester—that the vertebrates originated in a Nemertine form, basing this on his discovery in the Nemertines of a continuous nerve sheath. The Descent of the Primates (1897) is the title under which were published his lectures at the sesquicentennial celebration at Princeton.
In 1883 he became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Hubrecht founded the Institut Internationale d'Embryologie, today known as the International Society of Developmental Biologists.