the probability of Butterfield’s com- 
plicity, but neither can I dismiss it 
out of hand. Finally Weiner mentions 
several other people who, in various 
ways, were associated with the Pilt- 
down finds. Among these, 1 select for 
mention Sam Woodhead, a chemist 
friend of Dawson’s, and Lewis Abbott, 
a competing collector who had a strong 
dislike for Dawson. Thus, a consid- 
erable number of potential coconspir- 
ators are in the field. And we must 
not overlook the possibility that there 
may have been three or more con- 
spirators at Piltdown. 
The late W.R. Brooks, founding 
chairman of the Department of Bi- 
ology at John Hopkins, said that “sus- 
pended judgment is the greatest tri- 
umph of intellectual discipline.” Until 
definitive evidence is available, we 
should aspire to that triumph in regard 
to the Piltdown conspiracy. 
Edward O. Dodson 
Department of Biology 
University of Ottawa 
To the Editor: 
Many years ago I referred in a lec- 
ture to the Piltdown forgery. Subse- 
quently I was admonished by two an- 
gry British dentists. “An Englishman 
would never do such a thing, but don’t 
forget, one tooth had been found by 
a French Jesuit.” 
In this magazine for August 1980, 
there appeared an article by Stephen 
Jay Gould trying to prove that Father 
Teilhard de Chardin had knowingly 
been involved in the Piltdown fraud. 
Gould is as positive in his interpre- 
tations and conclusions as he is wrong, 
and his article cannot be accepted 
without protest and correction. 
It is not necessary here to repeat 
the story of “Piltdown man,” which 
turned out to be a chimera, a com- 
position of a hominid braincase and 
the mandible of an ape. Irritating from 
the beginning, this find had troubled 
a whole generation of earnest scien- 
tists. Teilhard, then a young and in- 
experienced man, had contact with 
Charles Dawson, the alledged discov- 
erer, and participated on occasion in 
his fieldwork. This makes Teilhard 
part of the Piltdown story. The other 
person involved was Sir Arthur Smith 
Woodward of the British Museum, a 
scholar of considerable reputation. 
Dawson had long been suspected 
to be the perpetrator of Piltdown man. 
But there was no proof of this. In 
a painstaking, thoroughly convincing 
way, Kenneth Oakley and J.S. Weiner 
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