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 letters from Cairo abound in tales of swapping and exchange with other natural historians of several North African nations. He was plugged into an amateur network of information and barter and might have received the teeth from a colleague.
This argument formed the base of evidence among my senior colleagues who suspected Teilhard-A. S. Romer, Bryan Patterson, and Louis Leakey (Leakey also mentioned Teilhard's knowledge of chemistry and the clever staining of the Piltdown bones). According to hearsay, le Gros Clark himself, a member of the trio that exposed the hoax, also suspected Teilhard on this basis. I regard this argument as suggestive, but not compelling. Dawson too was plugged into a network of amateur exchange.
3. Teilhard's good luck at Piltdown. Although records are frustratingly vague, I believe that all the Piltdown pieces were found by the original trio-Dawson, Smith Woodward, and Teilhard. (In the official version, a workman may have given Dawson the first piece in 1908.) Dawson, of course, unearthed most of the material himself. Smith Woodward, so far as I can tell, found only one cranial fragment. Teilhard, who spent less time at Piltdown than his two colleagues, was blessed. He found a fragment of the elephant tooth, a worked flint, and the famous canine.
People who have never collected in the field probably do not realize how difficult and chancy the operation is when fossils are sparse. There is no magic to it, just hard work. A tooth in a gravel pit is about as conspicuous as the proverbial needle in a haystack. The hoaxer worked hard on his Piltdown material. He filed the canine and painted it to simulate age. Apes' teeth are not easy to come by. If I had but one precious item, I would not stick it into a large gravel heap and then hope that some innocent companion would find it. It would probably be lost forever, not triumphantly  recovered. I doubt that I would ever find it again myself, after someone else had mucked about extensively in the pile.
Teilhard described his discovery in the firs