THE ORIGIN OF THE HUMAN BODY 321 



gravels had been considerably rainwashed, he recovered other 

 fragments of the skull. All parts of the skeletal remains are 

 said to have been found within a radius of several yards from 

 the site of the initial discovery. The skull was reconstructed 

 by Dr. A. Smith Woodward and deposited in the British 

 Museum of Natural History at South Kensington. Eoliths were 

 found in the same gravel as the skull. 



Of the skull, according to Woodward, four parts remain, 

 which, however, were integrated from nine fragments of bone. 

 "The human remains," he says, "comprise the greater part of 

 a brain-case and one ramus of the mandible, with two lower 

 molars." Of Woodward's reconstruction, Keith tells us that 

 "an approach to symmetry and a correct adjustment of parts 

 came only after many experimental reconstructions" (cf. 

 "Antiquity of Man," p. 364), and he also remarks 

 that, when Woodward undertook to "replace the miss- 

 ing points of the jaws, the incisor and canine teeth, he 

 followed simian rather than human lines." {Op. cit., 

 p. 324.) Here we may be permitted to observe that, 

 even apart from the distorting influence of preconceived the- 

 ories, this business of reconstruction is a rather dubious pro- 

 cedure. The absence of parts and the inevitable modification 

 introduced by the use of cement employed to make the frag- 

 ments cohere make accurate reconstruction an impossibility. 

 The fact that Woodward assigned to the lower jaw a tooth 

 which Gerrit Miller of the United States Museum assigns to 

 the upper jaw, may well give pause to those credulous persons, 

 who believe that palaeontologists can reliably reconstruct a 

 whole cranium or skeleton from the minutest fragments. 

 Sometimes, apparently, the "experts" are at sea even over so 

 simple a question as the proper allocation of a tooth. 



Woodward, however, was fully satisfied with his own artistic 

 work on Eoanthropus; for he says: "While the skull, indeed, 

 is evidently human, only approaching a lower grade in certain 

 characters of the brain, in the attachment for the neck, the 

 extent of the temporal muscles and in the probable size of the 



