76 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 83 



Cast," * says : " Taking all its features into consideration, we must 

 regard this as being the most primitive and most simian human brain 

 so far recorded." In his 1927 treatise on the " Evolution of Man " 

 (pp. 126-127) Professor Smith is much less explicit, but mentions a 

 number of details in which he believes the brain was inferior, and it 

 is plain that he still regards it much as he did before. 



On the other hand. Sir Arthur Keith, unquestionably one of the 

 foremost living anatomists of the present time, concludes,^ after an 

 at least equally painstaking study of the originals and their casts, 

 that so far as the more basal parts are concerned, " we have seen no 

 feature of the Piltdown brain to which we can apply with any cer- 

 tainty the term of primitive or simian ; all the characters we have 

 encountered are not very unlike those seen in modern skulls and 

 brains " (p. 620) ; and " it appears, even in its convolutionary ar- 

 rangement, to fall well within the limits of variation seen in modern 

 human brains " (p. 621). " In the development of the occipital poles 

 of the brain, this early Pleistocene man shows, not a primitive feature, 

 but one which must be regarded as evidence of a fairly high degree 

 of specialization" (p. 627). And finally (p. 634): "Thus an ex- 

 amination of the brain cast confirms the conclusion reached from an 

 examination of the skull, namely, that a mistake was made in the iden- 

 tification of the parts lying in the middle line which greatly diminished 



the real size of the brain, and these mistakes continue to be made 



The asymmetry of the two sides has largely disappeared. The ar- 

 rangement of the meningeal vessels and of the convolutions of the 

 left side are seen to harmonize with those of the right. At the same 

 time the large areas of the brain, representing the higher association 

 centres, are restored, and we obtain a brain primitive in some respects, 

 it is true, but in all its characters directly comparable with that of 

 modern man." 



THE LOWER JAW 



The lower jaw, as stated, was found personally by Dawson, appar- 

 ently close to the spot where the skull was discovered, in " a somewhat 

 deeper depression of the undisturbed gravel " (Quart. Journ. Geol. 

 Soc, 1913, p. 121). " The jaw api^eared to have been broken at the 

 symphysis and abraded perhaps where it lay fixed in the gravel and 

 before its complete deposition. The fragments of the cranium show 

 little or no signs of rolling or other abrasion " (ibid.). 



'Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, Vol. 69, p. 147, 1913. 

 ^ Antiquity of Man, 1925. 



