ear, 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 investigation into this extraordinary silence, and trying to be as charitable as 1 could, I constructed two possible exonerating reasons for Teilhard's failure to discuss the major event of his paleontological youth. Kenneth Oakley then told me of the 1920 article, the only analysis of Piltdown that Teilhard ever published. 1 found a copy in the ten-volume edition of Teilhard's oeuvre scientifique, and realized that its content invalidated the only exculpatory arguments I could construct.
The first argument: Marcellin Boule, Teilhard's revered teacher, was a leading critic of Piltdown. He regarded it as a mixture of two creatures (not as a fraud), although he softened his opposition after he learned of the subsequent discovery at Piltdown 2. Perhaps Boule upbraided his young student for gullibility, and Teilhard, embarrassed to the quick, never spoke of the infernal creature, or of his role in discovering it, again.
The 1920 article invalidates such a conjecture, for in this work, Teilhard comes down squarely on the right side. He mentions that his English companions, convinced by finding the jaw so close to the skull fragments, never doubted the integrity of their fossil. Teilhard then notes, with keen insight, that experts who had not seen the specimens in situ would be swayed primarily by the formal anatomy of the bones themselves, and that these bones loudly proclaimed: human skull, ape's jaw. Which emphasis, then, shall prevail, geology or anatomy? Although he had witnessed the geology, Teilhard opted for anatomy:
In order to admit such a combination of forms [a human skull and an ape's jaw in the same creature], it is necessary that we be forced to such a conclusion. Now this is not the case here. . . . The reasonable attitude is to grant primacy to the intrinsic morphological probability over the extrinsic probability of geological conditions.... We must suppose that the Piltdown skull and jaw belong to two different subjects.
Teilhard called it once, and he called it right. He had no reason to be embarrassed