THE PILTDOWN FORGERY Piltdown man is dead ! It had
to be told, 1 suppose, this revelation of the truth, —and the falsity; yet now that the bones of the anthropological plot have been laid so cruelly bare there are those of us who wish that it had not been so, and that the wrong might have remained unrighted. If, as one might have thought, the denuncia- tion had affected only anthropologists and archaeologists there would have been little enough cause for complaint—the world is theirs to dig in and the shape of the earthy past is theirs for interpretation—but with relics so famed and so honoured as the bones of Piltdown man much wider spheres of learning are involved.
There is a point in history beyond which all " fact " is suspect and all evidence is legend. Beyond this point all study is an act of faith. One gropes through the mists of time, peers at shadows, and any relic, any substantial find, is a straw to clutch at, a raft for one's ignorance. This is why we peer through the glass of museum show-cases at broken pottery, and arrowheads, and chips of marble from some Grecian frieze. This is why we are fascinated by the ruins of Ur and the colossi of the Valley of the Kings. If these things are, then all else might have been. This was the comfort of Piltdown man. Although the remains were " prehistoric " yet they gave us confidence in the study of much that was, for example, only medieval. After all, com- pared with Piltdown man, feudal tenure was an institution of yesterday. If we had proof of the one might we not with more confidence investigate the obscurities of the other ? From that safe in the British Museum there seemed to be a light shining across the space of fifty thousand years; it showed Time in its proper—or Toynbeeian—perspective.
But now the light has gone, and what arewe to do ? Now that the bones of prehistoric man have been shown to be those of a modern ape; now that the pleistocenic stains have been proved a bichromate of potash and iron, where will it all end ? What of" Palaeolithic" flints and " Neolithic" axe-heads ? What of " Castor " pottery and King Alfred's Jewel ? Were the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles written by a seventeenth-century undergraduate who took a fourth in Greats and wanted satisfaction.
The possibilities are enormous and our consternation proportionally great. When Mr. T. S. Eliot said recently that "if there is no truth that our ancestors did not discover then there is also no possible error by which they have not been deceived," he pointed the matter well. Was not Hebert really the most benevolent of revolutionaries ? What about that correspondence between Marie Antoinette and Barnave ?
This is the tragedy bf the affair. From now on we must be for ever qualifying our opinions and beliefs. We• can afford very few state- ments of plain and simple fact. Cautious and
scholarly doubt may grow into cynical and overwhelming distrust. We hear the voice of Henry Ford saying "History is bunk." We deplore the vulgarity, but draw our gowns more closely about our Shoulders. There is a chill wind blowing from the Sussex Downs and the Anatomy Department of this university. Only the ghost of Piltdown man can be smiling, for the roots of learning have been shaken, and where will the axe fall next ? —Yours faithfully,'
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