omme par exprès 1, the condyle is missing!"
"Comme par exprès." I couldn't get those words out of my mind for two days. Yes, it could be a literary line, a permissible metaphor for emphasis. But I think that Teilhard was trying to tell us something he didn't dare reveal directly.
1. Teilhard's embarrassment at Oakley's disclosure. Kenneth Oakley told me that, although he had not implicated Teilhard in his thoughts, one aspect of Teilhard's reaction had always puzzled him. All other scientists, including those who had cause for the most profound embarrassment (like the aged Sir Arthur Keith, who had used Piltdown for forty years as the bedrock of his thought), expressed keen interest amidst their chagrin. They all congratulated Oakley spontaneously and thanked him for resolving an issue that had always been puzzling, even though the solution hurt so deeply. Teilhard said nothing. His congratulations arrived only when they could not be avoided-in the preface to a letter responding to Oakley's direct inquiries. When Teilhard visited London, Oakley tried to discuss Piltdown, but .Teilhard always changed the subject. He took Teilhard to a special exhibit at the British Museum illustrating how the hoax had been uncovered. Teilhard glumly walked through as fast as he could, eyes averted, saying nothing. (A. S. Romer told me several years ago that he also tried to conduct Teilhard through the same exhibit, and with the same strange reaction.) Finally, Teilhard's secretary took Oakley aside and explained that Piltdown was a sensitive subject with Father Teilhard.
But why? If he had been gulled by Dawson at the site, he had certainly recouped his pride. Smith Woodward had devoted his life to Dawson's concoction. Teilhard had written about it but once, called it as correctly as he could, and  then shut up. Why be so embarrassed? Unless, of course, the embarrassment arose from guilt about another aspect of his silence-his inability to come clean while he watched men he loved and respected make fools of themselves, partly on his account. Marcellin Boule, his beloved master, for example, correctly called Smith Woodward's Eoanthropus "an artificial and composite being" in the first edition of Les hommes fossiles (1921). The skull, he said, could belong to "unbourgeois de Londres ",. the jaw belonged to an ape. But he pondered the significance of Piltdown 2 and changed his mind in the second edition of 1923: "In the light of these new facts, I cannot be as sure as I was before. I recognize that the balance has now tipped a bit in the direction of Smith Woodward's hypothesis-and I am happy for this scientist whose knowledge and character I esteem equally." How did Teilhard feel as he watched his beloved master, Boule, failing into the abyss-when he contained tools for extraction that he could not use.
2. The elephant and the hippo. Bits and pieces of other fossil mammals were salted into the Piltdown gravels in order to set a geologic matrix for the human finds. All but two of these items could have been collected in England. But the hippo teeth, belonging to a distinctive dwarfed species, probably came from the Mediterranean island of Malta. The elephant tooth almost surely came from a distinctive spot at Ichkeul, Tunisia, for it is highly radioactive as a result of seepage from surrounding sediments rich in uranium oxide. This elephant species has been found in several other areas, but nowhere else in such highly radioactive sediments. Moreover, the lchkeul site was only discovered by professionals in 1947; the doctored specimen at Piltdown could not have come from a cataloged museum collection.
Teilhard taught physics and chemistry at a Jesuit school in Cairo from 1905 to 1908. Just before coming to Piltdown. His volume of Letters from Egypt again records little about theology and teaching, but much about travel, natural history, and collecting. He did not call at Tunisia or Malta on his passage down, but I can find no record of his passage back, and the two areas are right on his route from Cairo to France. In any case, Teilhard's le