358 THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN 
Crag " of Suffolk — a Pliocene deposit — flints which are 
admitted by most experts to be shaped by man's hand. 
In England and in Italy, as we have already seen, remains 
of men of the modern type have been found in natural 
deposits and strata which are of a mid-Pleistocene age. 
All those discoveries of the modern type of man are 
disputed. It is therefore important to determine the 
size and form of brain in an early Pleistocene, or late 
Pliocene, type of man — one whose authenticity is beyond 
question. It will be seen, therefore, as I labour to make 
clear the nature of the Piltdown skull, that it is not the 
correct rendering of the details of the head-form which 
is the real object I have in view ; it is a much wider 
issue. We want to know what stage of brain develop- 
ment this particular type of man had reached so long ago. 
If the Piltdown man is a fair sample of his time, and if 
the opinions of Dr Smith Woodward and Professor 
Elliot Smith are well founded, then indeed we human 
beings have progressed rapidly to our present estate, and 
the great mask of civilisation which man has made a part 
of himself is in a geological sense merely a mushroom 
growth. If, on the other hand, we believe that in this 
early form of man we find a comparatively large, if some- 
what simple, human brain, then our story is very different. 
Behind us must lie vast periods of human endeavour, 
reaching a much longer way into the geological past than 
most of us have hitherto suspected. 
At this point I propose to give an account of a recent 
experiment, of which I was the willing subject, because 
it serves to bring out the difficulties of rightly interpreting 
and of reconstructing ancient skulls. The question is 
often asked : Are four fragments of a skull, such as 
those found at Piltdown, sufficient to give us a definite 
clue to the original form of skull ? Apparently not ; 
at least it was clear that reconstructions by Dr Smith 
Woodward and by myself indicated men of a totally 
different type. To test the matter. Professor F. G. 
Parsons of St Thomas's Hospital Medical School, 
London, made a proposal to me, namely, that he and 
