310 THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN 
Newton, who, in 1896, brought the Galley Hill discovery 
before the same Society as now discussed the Piltdown 
find, was also present. It must have puzzled him to 
explain why the audience, which in 1896 refused to 
accept the Galley Hill discovery, because the remains 
were those of a being framed much as we moderns are, 
should extend so ready an acceptance to the very simian 
form of man Dr Smith Woodward had raised from the 
Piltdown fragments. Here we are concerned only with 
the opinion Mr Newton formed of the antiquity of the 
Piltdown remains. To him, "the highly mineralised 
condition of the specimens seemed to point to their 
being of Pliocene age rather than Pleistocene." 
The writer is a student of the human body, and is 
therefore not in a position to offer any conclusive 
evidence which will help to settle whether the Piltdown 
man was Pleistocene or Pliocene. Yet there is one point 
which must weigh with those who seek to place this 
newly discovered human form in its proper place in the 
scale of time. The lower jaw, especially in the region 
of the chin, is marked by certain characters which separate 
it sharply from the corresponding part of all human 
mandibles and link it closely with the jaw of apes. Even 
in the Heidelberg mandible, which belongs to the early 
Pleistocene age, the human features have already begun 
to appear. In the Piltdown mandible the conformation 
is that of the ape ; a simian stage is still preserved. The 
Heidelberg mandible shows that the human contour of 
the chin had already appeared at the beginning of the 
Pleistocene, but a change of this kind has not become 
manifest in the Piltdown mandible. This feature suggests 
that Piltdown man represents, as the animal remains 
accompanying him suggest, a Pliocene form. I am of 
opinion that "future discoveries will prove that the remains 
found at Piltdown represent the first trace yet found of 
a Pliocene form of man. 
The reader may feel by the time he has reached this 
point that enough has been said about the time at which 
the Piltdown man lived. Probably he is already wearied 
