In the course of the darting to and fro amongst human and sub-human
pre-history, Mr. Belloc criticises me severely for quoting Sir Arthur
Keith’s opinion upon the Piltdown remains. I have followed English
authorities. All these remains are in England, and so they have been
studied at first hand mostly by English people. No one can regret this
insularity on the part of _Eoanthropus_ more than I do, but it leaves
Mr. Belloc’s “European opinion on the whole” rejecting Sir Arthur
Keith as a rather more than usually absurd instance of Mr. Belloc’s
distinctive method. “_What_ European opinion?” you ask. Mr. Belloc does
not say. Probably Belloking of Upsala and Bellokopoulos of Athens.
Mr. Belloc--forgetting that in an earlier edition of the _Outline_ I
give a full summary of the evidence in this case, up-to-date--informs
his Catholic audience that I have apparently read nothing about the
Piltdown vestige but an “English work.” And then he proceeds to fall
foul of the “restoration” of _Eoanthropus_. It is an imaginary picture
of the creature, and I myself think that the artist has erred on the
human side. Mr. Belloc objects to all such restorations.
Well, we have at least a saucerful of skull fragments and a doubtful
jawbone to go upon, and the picture does not pretend to be, and
no reader can possibly suppose it to be, anything but a tentative
restoration. But why a great Catholic apologist of all people, the
champion of a Church which has plastered the world with portraits
of the Virgin Mary, of the Holy Family, and with pictures of saints
and miracles in the utmost profusion, without any warning to the
simple-minded that these gracious and moving figures to which they
give their hearts may be totally unlike the beings they profess to
represent--why he should turn iconoclast and object to these modestly
propounded restorations passes my comprehension. At Cava di Tirrene
near Naples I have been privileged to see, in all reverence, a hair
of the Virgin, small particles of St. Peter, and other evidences of
Christianity; and they did not seem to me to be so considerable in
amount as even the _Eoanthropus_ fragments. And again, in this strange
outbreak of iconoclastic rage, he says:--
“Again, we have the coloured picture of a dance of American Red
Indians round a fire solemnly presented as a ‘reconstruction’ of
Palæolithic society.”
He has not even observed that the chief figures in that picture are
copied directly from the actual rock paintings of Palæolithic men
although this is plainly stated.