e imagine-that a great thinker is also an exemplary human being.)  Since then, I have sharpened the basic arguments and read through Teilhard's published work, finding a pattern that seems hard to reconcile with his innocence. My case is, to be sure, circumstantial (as is the case against Dawson or anyone else), but I believe that the burden of proof must now rest with those who would hold Father Teilhard blameless.
The Case against Teilhard
THE LETTERS TO KENNETH OAKLEY
The main virtue of truth, quite apart from its ethical value (which I hold to be considerable), is that it represents an infallible guide for keeping your story straight. The problem with prevarication is that, when the going gets complex or the recollection misty, it becomes very difficult to remember all the details of your invented scheme. Richard Nixon finally succumbed on a minor matter, and Sir Waiter Scott spoke truly when he wrote the famous couplet: "Oh, what a tangled web we weave,/When first we practice to deceive! "
Teilhard made just such a significant slip on a minor point in his letter to Oakley. Teilhard offered no spontaneous recollections about Piltdown and responded only to Oakley's direct inquiries for help in establishing the forger's identity. He begins by congratulating Oakley "most sincerely on your solution of the Piltdown problem. Anatomically speaking, 'Eoanthropus' [Smith Woodward's name for the Piltdown animal] was a kind of monster. . . . Therefore I am fundamentally pleased by your conclusions, in spite of the fact that, sentimentally speaking, it spoils one of my brightest and earliest paleontological memories."-
Teilhard then stonewalls on the question of fraud. He refuses to believe it at all, declaring that Smith Woodward and Dawson (and, by implication, himself) were not the kind  of men who could conceivably do such a thing. Is it not possible, he asks, that some collector discarded the ape bones in a gravel pit that legitimately contained a human skull, the product of a recent interment? Could not the iron staining have been natural, since the local water "can stain (with iron) at a remarkable speed"? But Teilhard's notion can explain neither the artificial filing of the teeth to simulate human wear nor the crucial discovery of a second combination of ape and human at the Piltdown 2 site. In fact, Teilhard admits: "The idea sounds fantastic. But, in my opinion, no more fantastic than to make Dawson the perpetrator of a hoax."-
Teilhard then goes on to discuss Piltdown 2 and, in trying to exonerate Dawson, makes his fatal error. He writes:
He [Dawson] just brought me to the site of Locality 2 and explained me [sic] that he had found the isolated molar and the small pieces of skull in the heaps of rubble and pebbles raked at the surface of the field.
But this cannot be. Teilhard did visit the second site with Dawson in 1913, but they did not find anything. Dawson "discovered- the skull bones at Piltdown 2 in January 1915, and the tooth not until July 1915. And now, the key point: Teilhard was mustered into the French army in December 1914 and was shipped immediately to the front, where he remained until the war ended. He could not have seen the remains of Piltdown 2 with Dawson, unless they had manufactured them together before he left (Dawson died in 1916).
Oakley caught the inconsistency immediately when he received Teilhard's letter in 1953, but he read it differently and for good reason. At that time, Oakley and his colleagues were just beginning their explorations into whodunit. They rightly suspected Dawson and had written to Teilhard to gather evidence. Oakley read Teilhard's statement when he was simply trying to establish the basic fact of Dawson's guilt. In that context, he assumed that Dawson had shown the specimens to Teilhard in 1913, but had withheld them from  Smith Woodward until 1915-more evidence for Dawson's complicity.
Oakley wrote back immediately, and Teilhard, realizing that he had tripped, began to temporize. In his second letter of January 29, 1954, he tried to recoup:
Concerning the point of "