Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (35 page)

^*
The first two volumes,
Ever Since Darwin
and
The Panda’s Thumb
, were published by W. W. Norton in 1977 and 1980 and are available in both hard and paperback editions. Again, the source of nearly all essays is my monthly column in
Natural History Magazine
, entitled
This View of Life
. Three essays did not originate there. Number 19 first appeared in
Discover Magazine
for May 1981; essay 24 was written for
Junk Food
published by the Dial Press, 1980. I wrote essay 17 for this volume as a commentary upon criticism that essay 16 has received since it first appeared in
Natural History
.

^*
Darwin died on April 19, 1882 and this column first appeared in
Natural History
in April 1982.

¹
This essay has been the subject of many commentaries, most positive, but some (to put it mildly) excoriatingly negative (the most brutal, if you’ll pardon the aroma of suspicion by association, from devotees of the “Teilhard cult”). In this light, I have decided to reprint the essay (which first appeared in
Natural History Magazine
for August, 1980) without any changes—for it would be unfair to improve it by correcting errors and ambiguities and then to turn on my detractors (see next essay) with a product better than the original that they first criticized. Since it is simply immoral to publish known error, I shall correct a few mistakes by footnote, so everyone can see where I goofed the first time round. I shall let all interpretations stand without comment and indicate any changes of opinion (minor and insubstantial) in the next essay.

²
I guess this should now read “Many pros and pols,” the wheel of fortune spinning quickly, as it does. Yet fiction has, ironically, the rock-hard permanence that fact must lack—and everyone did do it, now and forever more, on the Orient Express.

³
I thank Rev. Thomas M. King, S. J. of Georgetown University for pointing out two inconsequential but highly embarrassing errors in this paragraph. Teilhard entered the Socity of Jesus in 1899, not 1902, and he was ordained in 1911, not 1912.

⁴
Again I thank Rev. King for calling my attention to an error, this one of some potential consequence and therefore more embarrassing. The longer Teilhard remained in England, the more opportunity he had to work with Dawson. He left, in fact, not “late in 1912,” as I stated, but on July 16.

⁵
I have since learned that Louis Leakey was far more serious in his probings than I had realized. He was convinced of Teilhard’s guilt and was writing a book on the subject when he died.

⁶
Several critics have pointed out that some of the letters refer to visits that Dawson made to Teilhard’s seminary at Ore Place rather than to field trips, or “excursions” proper. I goofed to be sure, but I don’t see how my point is weakened.

⁷
(This footnote, and only this one, was part of the original essay.) Teilhard’s complete works are spread over two editions—a thirteen-volume edited compendium of his general articles (Paris: Editions de Seuil), and a more extensive ten-volume facsimile reprint of his professional publications (Olten: Walter-Verlag). To my annoyance, I discovered that the Paris edition has expurgated all Piltdown references without so stating and without even inserting ellipses. In trying to spiff up Teilhard’s record, they have made him appear even more culpable by accentuating the impression of guilty silence. I therefore consulted likely originals whenever I could find them. One expurgation is particularly infuriating in its downright misrepresentation. A posthumous volume of essays,
Le Coeur de la matière
(“The heart of matter,” Seuil, 1976), reprints Teilhard’s application for the chair of paleontology at the Collège de France in 1948 (ecclesiastical authority did not permit him to accept). In this autobiographical essay, Teilhard discusses his role in human paleontology: “My first stroke of good luck in this area of ancient human paleontology came in 1923 when I was able to establish, with Emile Licent, the existence, hitherto contested, of paleolithic man in Northern China.” If Teilhard had thus truly suppressed Piltdown in presenting himself for review, what but complicity could we infer? By sheer good fortune, I found a copy of this unpublished, mimeographed document in the reprint collection of my late colleague A. S. Romer. It reads: “My first stroke of good luck in this area of ancient human paleontology was to be included, when still young, in the excavation of
Eoanthropus dawsoni
in England. The second was, in 1923, to be able to establish, with Emile Licent….” I doubt that half a dozen copies of the unpublished original exist in America, and I might easily have been led from the published and doctored version to an even stronger indication of Teilhard’s complicity based on his silence. (It has, of course, occurred to me that the pattern of silence I detect in Teilhard’s writing might represent more his editor’s posthumous expurgation than Teilhard’s own preference. Yet the completely honest ten-volume facsimile edition contains more than enough material to establish the pattern, and I have checked enough original versions of potentially expurgated texts to be confident that references to Piltdown are fleeting and exceedingly sparse throughout Teilhard’s writing.)

⁸
Essay 18 presents a more detailed account of Teilhard’s evolutionary philosophy.

¹
Even if he decided that the jaw belonged to an ape and had been mixed by accident into the two Piltdown sites, the skull remained a genuine human fossil—thick and therefore “primitive,” but of modern human capacity. This is the dual solution that he favored in his 1920 article.

^*
First appeared in
Discover Magazine
, May 1981.