son, in the discussion following Smith Woodward's talk, paid tribute to the "patient and skilled assistance" given to him by Teilhard since 1909. 1 don't regard this, in itself, as a particularly damning point. A first meeting in 1911 would still be early enough for complicity (Dawson "found" his first piece of the Piltdown skull in 1911, although he states that a workman had given him a fragment "several years before"), and 1 would never hold a mistake of two years against a man who tried to remember the event forty years later. Still, the later (and incorrect) date, right upon the heels of Dawson's first "find," certainly averts suspicion from Teilhard.
2. Oakley wrote again in February 1954, probing further into Dawson's first contact with the Piltdown material, wondering in particular what had happened in 1908. Teilhard simply replied (March 1, 1954): "In 1908 1 did not know Dawson." True enough, but they met just a few months later, and Teilhard might have mentioned it. A small point, to be sure.
3. In the same letter, Teilhard tries further to avert suspicion by writing of his years at Hastings: "You know, at that time, I was a young student in theology-not allowed to leave much his cell of Ore Place (Hastings)." But this description of a young, pious, and restricted man stands in stark contrast with the picture that Teilhard painted of himself at the time in a remarkable series of letters to his parents (Lettres de Hastings et de Paris 1908-1912, Paris: Aubier, 1965). These letters speak little of theology, but they are filled with charming and detailed accounts of Teilhard's frequent wanderings all over southern England. Eleven letters refer to excursions with Dawson, 6 and no other naturalist is mentioned so frequently. If he spent much time at Ore Place, he didn't choose to write about it. On August 13, 1910, for example, he exclaims: "I have travelled up and down the coast, to the left and right of Hastings; thanks to the cheap trains [les cheaptrains as he writes in French] so common at this time of year, it is easy to go far with minimal expense."
Perhaps I am now too blinded by my own attraction to the hypothesis of Teilhard's complicity. Perhaps all these points are minor and unrelated, testifying only to the faulty memory of an aging man. But they do form an undeniable pattern. Still, 1 would not now come forward with my case were it not for a second argument, more circumstantial to be sure, but somehow more compelling in its persistent pattern of forty years-the record of Teilhard's letters and publications.
PILTDOWN IN TEILHARD'S WRITING
I remember a jokebook I had as a kid. The index listed "mule, sex life," but the indicated page was blank (ridiculous, in any case, for mules do not abstain just because the odd arrangement of their hybrid chromosomes debars them from bearing offspring). Teilhard's published record on Piltdown is almost equally blank. In 1920, he wrote one short article in French for a popular journal on Le cas de 1'homme de Piltdown. After this, virtually all is silence. Piltdown never again received as much as a full sentence in all his published work (except once in a footnote). Teilhard mentioned Piltdown only when he could scarcely avoid it-in comprehensive review articles that discuss all outstanding human fossils. I can find fewer than half a dozen references in the twenty-three volumes of his complete works. In each case,  Piltdown appears either as an item listed without comment in a footnote or as a point (also without comment) on a drawing of the human evolutionary tree or as a partial phrase within a sentence about Neanderthal man. 7
Consider just how exceedingly curious this is. In his first letter to Oakley, Teilhard described his work at Piltdown as "one of my brightest and earliest paleontological memories." Why, then, such silence? Was Teilhard simply too  diffident or saintly to toot his own trumpet? Scarcely, since no theme receives more voluminous attention, in scores of later articles, than his role in unearthing the legitimate Peking man in China.
As I began my inv