CHAPTER XXII 
AN EXPERIMENT IN RECONSTRUCTION 
If I were free to choose I would not inflict the reader with 
further dry and technical details concerning the Piltdown 
skull. The sharp controversy, however, which has sprung 
up amongst British anatomists makes a plain and simple 
narrative impossible ; we must take nothing for granted ; 
every point has to be proved. Under ordinary circum- 
stances it ought to be a simple task for an anatomist to 
restore such a skull as that which has been hidden away 
these hundreds of thousand years in the Piltdown gravel ; 
why, then, is there so much difficulty ? There are two 
reasons. In the first place, the simian characters of the 
mandible indicate that the skull should be a small one — 
for the simian skull and brain cavity are small when con- 
trasted with the human cranium. The law of correlation 
of the various parts of the animal body does not always 
hold true ; the discoveries of recent years have shown 
that Nature in her time has built up animal forms in 
which characters culled from diverse animal types have 
been combined. 
But there is another reason why we naturally suppose 
the brain of the Piltdown race to be a small one. We 
still live in the shadow of the times when man's first 
appearance was regarded as one of the most recent events 
in the earth's history. I am not speaking of pre-Darwinian 
days, but of some thirty years ago, when the theory of 
evolution was making headway, and when thinking people 
had accepted as a truth the origin of man from a more 
humble form. The contemporaries and successors of 
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