478 Obituary—Oharles Dawson. 
was gladly accepted by the British Museum. From that time until 
nearly the end of his life he made continual additions to the Dawson 
Collection, as it was named by the Museum, where it now occupies 
a conspicuous position. The last noteworthy accession to it was the 
finest known specimen of the Wealden ganoid fish, Lepidotus mantelli. 
On the death of Mr. Beckles in 1890, Mr. Dawson also gave much 
help to the British Museum in labelling the collection of Wealden 
fossils which was acquired from that gentleman’s executors. 
Among the Wealden Dinosaurian remains discovered by Mr. Dawson, 
Mr. Lydekker recognized three new species of Jyuanodon, of which 
one was named J, dawsont. Among his later discoveries was the first 
tooth of a Wealden mammal, Plagiaulax dawson. He obtained this 
specimen from one of the fine pebbly bone-beds which occur in different 
horizons of the Wealden series. He subsequently encouraged two 
French students at the Hastings Jesuit College, Fathers Teilhard de 
Chardin and Pelletier, to examine these bone-beds more thoroughly, 
and they succeeded in finding a second form of mammalian tooth, 
Dipriodon valdensis, besides numerous rare teeth of reptiles and fishes. 
Mr. Dawson was also the stimulating friend of Mr. Philip Rufford, 
who made the great collection of Wealden plants now in the British 
Museum. 
While interested chiefly in the fossils of the Wealden formation, 
Mr. Dawson also paid much attention to its more purely geological 
features, and he made one important investigation of the natural gas 
at Heathfield, which he described to the Geological Society in 1898. 
He also exhibited zincblende from the Wealden and Purbeck beds to 
the same Society in 1913. 
Mr. Dawson’s most important archeological work culminated in 
his publication of the two handsome volumes on the History of 
Hastings Castlein 1909. His interest in geology, however, gradually 
led him to turn to prehistoric archeology, and during his later years 
he searched most persistently the superficial deposits of Southern 
Sussex. His ultimate success was his recognition of the great antiquity 
of the Piltdown gravel, and his discovery in this deposit of the skull 
and mandible of the oldest known type of man, Hoanthropus dawsont, 
which was described to the largest meeting of the Geological Society 
ever assembled in December, 1912. The story of this discovery, which 
was not altogether accidental but the outcome of logical reasoning, is 
now so well known and has been so often repeated that it need not 
be further detailed here. 
Mr. Dawson made few contributions to geological literature—he 
preferred to hand over his specimens to experts who had made 
a special study of the groups to which they belonged. He published 
only one paper in the Grotoeican Maceazine, on ‘‘ Dene Holes, Ancient 
and Modern’’ (1898, p. 293), concluding that they were all mines. 
His only contributions to the Geological Society’s Quarterly Journal 
were those on Natural Gas and the Piltdown Man already mentioned. 
His last paper, read to the Anthropological Institute in 1915, was an 
ingenious comparison between the shapes of the so-called ‘ Koliths’ 
of tabular flint and the shapes of diminutive splinters obtained from 
the hexagonal columns of starch. He maintained that tabular flint 
