d with Teilhard's work and praised him lavishly in a publication. He accepted Teilhard as the only other member of their initial collecting trips at Piltdown. Moreover, Teilhard was a house guest of the Smith Woodwards when he visited London in September 1913, following his discovery of the canine. If Dawson had shown Teilhard the Piltdown 2 finds in 1913, then led Smith Woodward extensively astray during several field trips in 1914, and if an innocent Teilhard had told Smith Woodward about the specimens (and I can't imagine why he would have held back), then Dawson would have been exposed.
3. Teilhard never did hear about the Piltdown 2 specimens from Dawson, but simply forgot forty years later that he had never actually viewed the fossils he had read about later. This is the only alternative (to Teilhard's complicity) that I view as at all plausible. Were the letters not filled with other damaging points, and the case against Teilhard not supported on other grounds, I would take this possibility more seriously.
4. Teilhard and Dawson planned the Piltdown 2 discovery before Teilhard left England. Forty years later, Teilhard misconstructed the exact chronology, forgot that he could not have seen the specimens when they were officially "found," and slipped in writing to Oakley.
Teilhard's letters to Oakley contain other curious statements, each insignificant (or subject to other interpretations) by itself, but forming in their ensemble a subtle attempt to direct suspicion away from himself.
 1. In his letter of November 28, 1953, Teilhard states that he first met Dawson in 1911. In fact, they met in May 1909, for Teilhard describes the encounter in a vivid letter to his parents. Moreover, this meeting was an important event in Teilhard's career, for Dawson befriended the young priest and personally forged his path to professional notice and respect by sending some important specimens he had collected to Smith Woodward. When Smith Woodward described this material before the Geological Society of London in 1911, Dawson, 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 y