The Curious Incident of the Missing Link
The Curious Incident of the Missing Link is an essay written by Doug Elliott published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box in 1988, and revised in january 2018.
Doug Elliott's essay is a detailed investigation into the Piltdown Man hoax, examining and ultimately rejecting the controversial theory that Arthur Conan Doyle helped engineer the fraud as revenge against scientific critics of Spiritualism. Blending literary analysis, biography, forensic history, palaeontology, Conan Doyle scholarship, and close examination of the evidence surrounding Charles Dawson and the Piltdown discoveries, Doug Elliott argues that the case against Conan Doyle relies too heavily on coincidence, speculation, and selective interpretation rather than convincing proof.
Below is the final 2018 revised version of the essay:
The Curious Incident of the Missing Link (2018)
The reconstruction of the Piltdown Skull.
The Piltdown jaw, heavily notched and drilled to take test samples over the years.
The author holds the controversial Piltdown canine.
Lower jaw of modern human, Piltdown man, and chimpanzee, from Sir Ray Lankester's Diversions of a Naturalist, 1915.
Had you been in a certain corner of Sussex on a bright morning in 1911, you would surely have seen him. It was quite early, and the spring dampness that hung with the mists over the south downs would have chilled you through, but the man seemed not to care. Indeed, his long, hearty stride, energetic for a man in his early fifties, displayed a sense of purpose that suggested this was more than a morning constitutional.
Any of the locals would have instantly recognized the man, and you should too, for it was none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, one of the most famous living Englishmen. He had by now killed and revived Sherlock Holmes, published several well-received historical novels, and created a national stir by his spirited defense of George Edalji and of the British conduct in South Africa. He and his family lived at Windlesham, Crowborough, just a few miles from this very spot, and the locals were quite accustomed to seeing him during his frequent long walks around the countryside.
Had you secretly followed you would have noticed that as Doyle approached the small town of Piltdown, he began more and more to glance around perhaps a little furtively, as though to avoid being seen. As he walked onto Piltdown common, he slowed his pace and veered off the road towards a gravel pit at Barkham Manor. On the floor of the pit were several piles of rocks which the workers had rejected, and as he passed one of these, his hand slipped into his pocket. Taking one more quick glance around and seeing no one, he dropped a handful of small, dark objects onto the heap, and then rapidly moved on. His step quickened and he seemed to relax as he continued back toward Crowborough.
Had you been there on that bright morning, you would have seen what no other human being has seen or at least admitted to: you would have seen the perpetrator of the greatest scientific fraud of the twentieth century at his work.
If we can rely upon certain pieces of evidence and the deductions that bind them together, this little fictional scene may well have happened. Surely not, you say. Not "Steel True, Blade Straight" Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the Master and his Boswell. Who makes this outrageous accusation? Calm yourself, and prepare for a long, confusing, and sometimes sorry tale, for this is quite a three-pipe problem...
I
- "I presume, Doctor, that you could tell the skull of a negro from that of an Esquimau?"
- "Most certainly."
- "But how?"
- "Because that is my special hobby. The differences are obvious. The supraorbital crest, the facial angle, the maxillary curve, the—"
- — The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901)
On December 18, 1912, Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward announced to the scientific community the discovery of the remains of a new form of primitive man. Nine pieces of a skull and part of a jaw had been unearthed in a gravel pit near the small Sussex town of Piltdown. Also found were a number of primitive flint implements and the fossil remains of several ancient animals: mastodon, deer, rhinoceros, beaver, elephant, horse, and hippo.
The remarkable aspect of this find lay in the nature of the human remains: the skull fragments were decidedly human, though unusually thick; the jaw fragment was in many aspects apelike but in others quite human. This justified, said Woodward, creating a new genus and species, and he named it, "in honour of its discoverer, Eoanthropus dawsoni."
The circumstances surrounding the discovery of these fossils are not entirely clear, and we should begin by introducing the two principals.
Charles Dawson, a local lawyer, was a geologist and archaeologist in the British tradition of the informed amateur. He was a Fellow of the Geological Society, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and an honorary collector for the British Museum. By 1912 he had built a sizeable reputation among his professional colleagues, and had become a skilled field worker. He discovered the first cranial fragment as far back as 1908 — the precise date is not known.
Arthur Smith Woodward had been Keeper of the Department of Geology at the British Museum since 1901; he was an acknowledged expert on fossil reptiles and fishes, and was familiar with previous discoveries of primitive human remains. He was trusted and respected for his work and was known as a thorough and observant researcher. Woodward had known Dawson for over twenty-five years, but did not become involved with the discoveries until Dawson wrote him about them in February of 1912.
The Piltdown find was exciting to British scientists for a number of reasons. It fulfilled the prediction of many Darwinians that primitive man developed first an advanced brain, while retaining an apelike jaw that sported large canines (eye teeth) which could still be used as weapons. It also provided a major boost to the national ego, since primitive human remains had until then been found only in continental Europe and Southeast Asia: the birthplace of Shakespeare and Newton could hardly be without earlier evidence of human cultural advances.
At the time of the initial announcement there was much debate centering around the jaw fragment. Only the left side of the jaw had been found, with the first and second molar teeth still in place. The articular condyle (the bony projection that hinges with the skull) had broken off. Human and ape jaws are hinged quite differently, and in Woodward's reconstruction of the entire skull from the fragments he had needed to provide a humanlike condyle in order to make the jaw fit properly. The chin region was also missing, another feature that generally shows distinctly ape-like or human-like characteristics. The existing fragment was ape-like in shape, size and structure, but the two molars showed significant flat wear, a pattern that appears on human molars but never on ape molars, again because of the difference in the way the jaw is hinged.
Many felt that Woodward was wrong in trying to fit skull and jaw together, and that the two parts came from two separate individuals, the skull from a human, the jaw from an ape. Others believed that finding the remains of two individuals so close together with such similar features was extremely unlikely. The flints and mammalian fossils certainly seemed to confirm the age of the human remains. In particular, it was noted that if a canine tooth had been found, and if it was relatively small in size and showed unape-like wear, this would serve to confirm the theory that skull and jaw belonged together; indeed, Woodward had made his plaster reconstruction with just such teeth.
During 1913 Dawson and Woodward continued, when they could, to look for more remains at the pit. They were joined by a young priest and theology student, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who in late August of that year unearthed the long sought for canine. When Woodward announced the find at a meeting of the British Association in Birmingham, many of the skeptics were converted: the canine matched almost exactly Woodward's earlier reconstruction, and the odds of skull and jaw belonging to different individuals now seemed exceedingly low.
In 1914, a carved piece of a fossil elephant femur was found near the gravel pit: Eoanthropus made tools!
Final confirmation came in 1915, when Dawson wrote to Woodward that he had found fragments of a second Piltdown man at another location (Site II) two miles away. There seemed no doubt that Woodward's designation of a new human species was justified.
In October of that year, Dawson fell ill with anemia and his participation was limited to a continuing correspondence with Woodward. Dawson's health declined until his death in September 1916. No more remains or artifacts were ever uncovered at the Piltdown pit.
Piltdown man was not, however, granted a comfortable home in science's world view of our past. For the next thirty years opinion was strongly divided: there were those who defended him; there were those who maintained that, however unlikely, the skull was human while the jaw was that of an ape (no fossil ape had ever been discovered in Britain); and there were those who thought and spoke as little as possible about it because, well, as more finds of fossil human remains were unearthed around the world, and the jigsaw puzzle picture of human development took a more definite and ordered shape, the odd collection of bone bits from the Sussex gravels came to look more and more like an outsider.
II
- With the brow of a philosopher above and the jaw of a sensualist below, the man must have started with great capacities for good or for evil.
- "The Empty House" (1903)
The controversy was still occasionally bobbing to the surface in 1953, when Dr. J. S. Weiner of Oxford University and two of his colleagues began to ask themselves some new questions about Britain's most famous fossil. What if the fragments really were from two separate individuals? What if they came to be in the gravels, not by chance, but by human agency? What if the jaw, to solve the problem of identification, was not a fossil at all, but the jaw of a modern ape? If these possibilities turned out to be true, then those features of the jaw that suggested extreme age-the colouration and patterns of wear-had been deliberately manufactured. The team tested their theory by careful examination of the jaw and teeth, and by performing newly-developed tests for fluorine content, which indicated the age of the objects.
Later that year the British Museum published their paper, "The Solution of the Piltdown Problem." It was a bombshell, and not only to a few specialists: "Piltdown Man Forgery", The Times headline of November 21, was typical of the reaction from the world press.
The fossils had been artificially stained by a bath in potassium bichromate to give the appearance of age; some had also been dipped in iron sulphate to impart the rusty colour of long oxidation in an iron-rich environment. The jaw's molars had been filed down to simulate human patterns of wear, and the isolated canine had also been stained and filed. The jaw itself, tests showed, was that of an orang-utan, and the skull, though human, was remarkable only in its thickness.
When the investigators examined the fragments with the idea of fraud in mind, they were surprised by the clumsiness of the execution. The canine had been filed down so vigourously that the file had broken though into the pulp cavity; a small spherical piece of metal was found imbedded in the enamel. And the staining of the canine had not been carefully accomplished using rare and convincing pigments: the tooth had simply been painted with Van Dyke brown, available in any paint store!
As obvious as the fakery now appeared, the identity of the perpetrator was just as obscure. Weiner argued for Dawson, and indeed Dawson has always been the prime suspect. The years since the exposure of the deception have seen a steady trickle of papers and books offering new theories: one recent estimate has put the number of suspects at 40! The list includes prominent scientists, local amateur geologists and anthropologists, and members of the British Museum staff, although Woodward himself has always been considered above suspicion.
In 1963, Rolfe Boswell offered the scandalous suggestion that the Piltdown hoaxer was Sherlock Holmes! The idea was effectively countered by E. Paul Durrenberger, who pointed out that, on the contrary, Holmes had detected the fraud, but his attempts at exposure went unnoticed.
The question of the hoaxer's identity is still an open one because all of the evidence is either circumstantial or hearsay: no one actually confessed, and by 1953 few of the original principals were still alive to tell their stories.
In the September 1983 issue of the popular magazine Science 83, John Hathaway Winslow and editor Alfred Meyer presented an intriguing theory: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did the Piltdown deed. His motive: revenge upon the "materialists" of the scientific community-and one in particular-who so ridiculed the spiritualism that Doyle had embraced.
III
- Circumstantial evidence is occasionally very convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau's example.
- "The Noble Bachelor" (1892)
Winslow's argument is supported by a long list of evidence, which I will try to summarize fairly.
MOTIVE: Doyle's strong belief in spiritualism placed him in frequent conflict with scientific skeptics of the day, many of whom were less than diplomatic about their attacks on the phenomenon and its believers. One such detractor was Edwin Ray Lankester who, until his retirement in 1907, was director of the British Museum (Natural History). In letters and columns he declared war on spiritualists and mediums, and in one spectacular case, in 1876, he caught the celebrated American medium "Doctor" Henry Slade red-handed and exposed him as a fraud. (1)
Catching one cheat increases the likelihood that they are all cheats, argued Lankester. Says Winslow: "Piltdown would provide a chance to reverse the tables by applying the same kind of logic: If science swallowed a scientific fraud like Piltdown Man, then all of science, especially the destructive and arrogant evolutionists, whom Doyle called the Materialists, could be condemned." Doyle even made reference to the Slade affair in his 1883 short story "The Captain of the Pole-Star." Says Winslow: "The message was that even if mediums such as Slade had been guilty of fraud, one does not condemn Spiritualism for this reason alone."
Lankester publicly predicted that the cranial capacity of primitive man would be much larger than was generally believed. He believed that certain chipped flints of disputed origin were man-made, and that eventually more refined examples of these flints would be discovered which would settle the question in his favour. These assertions set him up: the Piltdown finds exactly matched his predictions.
OPPORTUNITY: Since Sir Arthur lived a mere eight miles from Piltdown and was known for taking long walks, he could have visited the site whenever he wished. We know from Weiner's book on the affair that he did visit the pit: "One visitor who came back two or three times in 1912 was none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle". In Winslow's words, he "visited it openly"; and "there is little doubt that he often visited the unguarded site." Since most of the remains were found on or near the surface, planting them would simply have been a matter of quickly dropping them onto a spoil heap.
Sir Arthur knew both Dawson and Woodward before the actual excavation; he met with Dawson, for example, to examine Doyle's own fossil discoveries. As such, he was in a perfect position to know when the team would be excavating and undoubtedly found out about their finds before the news was actually published.
Doyle was in an excellent position to have acquired the collection of ancient bits and pieces from which the Piltdown finds were undoubtedly drawn:
- He could have bought the skulls from the famous phrenologist Jessie Fowler, with whom Doyle was acquainted, and who is known to have sold skulls;
- He could have acquired the orang-utan jaw from a former neighbour, Cecil Wray, a well-known collector and fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society, who returned from a Malaysian trip in 1906, and whose brother was head of the Malay museums;
- The source of some other fossils found at Piltdown was identified as Ichkeul in Tunisia. Doyle in 1907 visited the archaeologist Joseph Whittaker, who traveled frequently to Ichkeul; alternatively, Doyle's 1909 cruise of the western Mediterranean stopped in Algeria and "almost certainly" (Winslow) Tunisia;
- Other fossils probably came from limestone caves on the islands of Malta or Corsica;
Winslow claims that during Doyle's honeymoon cruise with Jean in 1907, he "in all probability" stopped at Malta; if not then, then maybe he acquired them on his 1909 Mediterranean cruise, which certainly did stop at Malta; "None of the other individuals suspected of being the hoaxer is known to have visited these islands or Tunisia." (Winslow)
- The flints found at Piltdown were similar to those found at Gafsa in Tunisia. In addition to the possible connections already discussed, Doyle's friend the author Norman Douglas sold or gave away some 400 Paleolithic flints collected during a protracted visit to Tunisia, spent mostly in Gafsa.
- The other mammalian fossils, such as beaver teeth, "likely" (Winslow) came from Norfolk or Suffolk. Doyle frequently vacationed in Norfolk and golfed at courses such as the Sheringham Golf Course, next to the East Runton deposit which was rich in the remains of Pleistocene mammals.
CHARACTER: Winslow describes Doyle as a "jokester", "a man who loved hoaxes." Moreover, he was familiar with famous hoaxes and practical jokes of the past.
In 1825 the eccentric naturalist Charles Waterton displayed the preserved head of what he claimed was a form of primitive man that he had killed while roaming the Amazon basin. The creature, which he called Nondescript, turned out to be a complete fabrication, one of Waterton's frequent forays into creative taxidermy. Waterton was an alumnus of Stonyhurst College which Doyle attended as a boy, and which frequently displayed Waterton's stuffed, er, creatures in its halls.
INTERESTS: Doyle took a keen interest in the findings. Dawson wrote to Woodward that "Conan Doyle has written and seems excited about the skull. He has kindly offered to drive me in his motor anywhere."
He was interested in paleontology. In fact, he had recently discovered some fossilized dinosaur footprints and bones near his home. He was also involved with a coal project in Kent which uncovered dinosaur remains. When as a young doctor in 1882 Doyle moved to Portsmouth, the previous occupant of his house was a dentist, who left a formidable collection of human jaw casts "heaped about in great numbers." Many of his first patients during this period were referred to him by a local dentist, and suffered from jaw problems. These factors, Winslow believes, created in Doyle "an abiding interest in human jaws." The evidence? "In a story about the life of a doctor, which is clearly autobiographic, he refers to one of his protagonists as a generalist who had one minor specialty: He was a 'jawman'; that is, a doctor who treated abscessed jaws and the like". Winslow believes that Doyle was fascinated with skulls as well. He mentions in support of this contention, Doyle's interest in phrenology, and his acquaintance with the famous phrenologist Jessie Fowler. He also quotes the phrenological observations of Dr. Mortimer on Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Mortimer noted that a cast of Holmes' skull, "until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum;"
ABILITY: Sir Arthur's medical training provided him with the necessary anatomical competence to construct the fakes, plus sufficient knowledge of paleontology and chemistry. Says Winslow, "Doyle was something of an expert on the use of potassium bichromate, having mentioned in his M.D. thesis its use in hardening and staining histological sections." He used this in addition to iron sulfate, another staining agent found in the Piltdown specimens.
CLUES IN THE LOST WORLD: Similarities between this novel, written between 1910 and 1911, and the Piltdown episode could only be explained if we assume that Doyle was planning and executing the hoax at the same time that he was writing the novel. "The timing is crucial, for the seeds of The Lost World appear to have been planted in Doyle's mind long before Piltdown was a site of recognized significance in anyone's mind." (Winslow)
- One character says, "if you are clever and you know your business, you can fake a bone as easily as you can a photograph."
- Another character states that the practical joke "would be one of the most elementary developments of man."
- "The occurrence of a time-mix in the living fossil animals of the story and those at Piltdown." (Winslow)
- The red-haired primitive men of the novel live near the alleged home of Waterton's Nondescript, and bear a striking similarity to orang-utans.
- The novel contains references to early man and missing links.
- The fictional plateau where most of the action takes place is described as "as large perhaps as Sussex"; a map of the plateau in the novel is markedly similar to the Weald, that area of Sussex, Surrey, and Kent which contains Piltdown.
- Many of the characters of the novel are modelled after friends and acquaintances of Sir Arthur.
There was an immediate reaction to Winslow and Meyer's article in the letter columns of Science 83.
Don Richard Cox attacked on three fronts. An association of Holmes and his creator could not be carried too far: in the fictional world of suspended disbelief Sherlock Holmes can out-reason the police and fool the experts, but in reality Doyle simply did not have such abilities. Rather than a "jokester" and "a man who loved hoaxes," Doyle was, he claimed, "singularly humourless in his life and fiction." Finally, though Doyle showed an interest in spiritualism in 1887, he did not become a crusader for the cause until after World War I. In 1912 he did not yet have the motive attributed to him for Piltdown.
The well-known anthropologist and popular science writer Stephen Jay Gould responded mostly to Winslow and Meyer's attack upon Gould's favourite Piltdown suspect, Teilhard de Chardin. "As to their case for Conan Doyle, what can one say of an evidence-free argument based on speculations about motive?"
A third correspondent dismissed the Doyle theory and took the credit for Piltdown himself. He signed his name: Moriarty!
At the same time, Piltdown scholar Peter Costello, and Dame Jean Conan Doyle, daughter of Sir Arthur, wrote a lengthy rebuttal of Winslow's position. Science 83 chose not to print this letter, but it has recently been published by the Baker Street Journal. Its major arguments are that the deed was not consistent with Doyle's character, that Doyle was not deeply enough involved in spiritualism to provide the alleged motive, that Doyle and Lankester were in fact friends, and that during 1912 Doyle was far too busy with other matters to have found the time for hoaxing.
In the Spring 1984 issue of Physical Anthropology News, Professor Ian Langham of the University of Sydney attacked the Doyle theory, but beyond this the controversy quickly appeared to subside. Sir Arthur's name is now part of the popular perception of the Piltdown story, a fact which from all accounts is most disturbing to Dame Jean Conan Doyle.
The evidence seemed weighty indeed, yet the Sherlockian world somehow felt that Sir Arthur simply could not have committed such an atrocity. Time passed. The number of papers and articles about Piltdown has hardly diminished since the exposure of the hoax in 1953; every few years another suspect or some new information surfaces, but little more has been said about the Doyle connection.
In 1986 came a major review of the state of the case, Charles Blinderman's book The Piltdown Inquest. Blinderman had done his homework: he had gone back to original sources; he had written or interviewed almost every one of the surviving principals and the purveyors of current theories; he had sifted through the original files in the British Museum; he had poked around the Piltdown pit. His book assesses the current crop of ten suspects with wit and what seems to me good sense.
What are we to make of the contention that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, vengeance-bent, carefully planned and executed the Piltdown fraud? As we are unable to consult the world's greatest detective, we must make do with what few skills we have, a great deal of help from Charles Blinderman, and a few references.
IV
- "I could hardly imagine a more damning case," I remarked. "If ever circumstantial evidence pointed to a criminal it does so here."
- "Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing," answered Holmes thoughtfully; "it may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different."
- "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" (1891)
Winslow insists that as far back as 1887 Doyle was a committed spiritualist, although the common view is that he was not "converted" until sometime in 1916. This is a critical point, because if the traditional position is supportable, Doyle has no motive.
On at least two occasions, Winslow has defended his statement, primarily based on a letter that Doyle wrote to the spiritualist magazine Light in July 1887. In the letter, he describes a particular seance he attended which "after many months of inquiry, showed me at last that it was absolutely certain that intelligence could exist apart from the body... After weighing the evidence, I could no more doubt the existence of the phenomena than I could doubt the existence of lions in Africa..." Winslow also notes that Doyle was one of the founding members of the Hampshire Psychic Society, and that he wrote occasionally about psychic matters in the years between 1887 and 1916.
I do not disagree that Doyle believed that there was sufficient proof of the reality of spiritualist phenomena. However, it was not until 1916 that the question of proof became irrelevant to him and he dedicated all of his energies to furthering the cause. In 1916, confronted with the unprecedented horrors of World War I, he was transformed from, as it were, a theologian on the matter, to an evangelist. In Doyle's first spiritualist book, The New Revelation (1918), he writes of this time in his life:
- In the presence of an agonized world, hearing every day of the deaths of the flower of our race in the first promise of their unfulfilled youth, seeing around one the wives and mothers who had no clear conception whither their loved one had gone to, I seemed suddenly to see that the subject with which I had so long dallied was not merely a study of a force outside the rules of science, but that it was really something tremendous, a breaking down of the walls between two worlds, a direct undeniable message from beyond, a call of hope and of guidance to the human race at the time of its deepest affliction. The objective side of it ceased to interest, for having made up one's mind that it was true there was an end of the matter. (Quoted in Hall.)
Trevor Hall, in his article "Conan Doyle and Spiritualism", examines Doyle's spiritualist activities in the years 1887 to 1916: "dallied" seems to be an accurate verb. Sir Arthur had done considerable reading over the years but then Sir Arthur was an avid reader on many subjects and had attended seances, introduced to the practice by his friend Major-General Alfred Wilkes Drayson in 1887. He joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1893, but seems to have thought their attitude to psychic investigation too skeptical, for he limited his contributions to paying his annual dues and participating in a single "haunted house" investigation which the SPR journal did not feel important enough to record. He contributed considerable sums to the more enthusiastic journal Light, but seemed to spend little of his time on the subject.
These activities hardly qualify him as a "dedicated spiritualist" during these early years. He later wrote: "I might have drifted on for my whole life as a psychical researcher, showing a sympathetic, but more or less dilettante attitude towards the whole subject, as if we were arguing about some impersonal thing such as the existence of Atlantis or the Bacon controversy." (Quoted in Hall.) Somehow these words do not suggest an attitude that would motivate fraud on a grand scale.
Winslow continues to confuse these periods in Sir Arthur's life: for example, he states:
- Besides being fascinated with science, Doyle was also a believer in Spiritualism. He so declared himself as early as 1887 in a letter to the journal Light, and he spent much of his time, energy, and money furthering the Spiritualist cause. He came, for example, to believe in such things as the existence of fairies, and other diminutive folk, as well as in the idea that an imminent apocalypse would be brought about by a wrathful "Central Intelligence" resulting in the death of most of the world's population.
These beliefs of which Winslow writes are very much a part of the period after 1916. Doyle's outbursts in print prior to 1916, and the "Captain of the 'Pole-Star"" reference is one example, are directed not so much against the anti-spiritualist position as against the closed minded in a more general sense. And, as Blinderman points out, the "reference" to the Slade affair in that story is not as oblique as Winslow suggests.
"The Captain of the 'Pole-Star" is a ghost story with a moral. The narrator, a young ship's surgeon on his first whaling voyage, is fascinated by the ship's mad captain, and a tentative relationship of mutual respect gradually develops between the two. Captain Craigie is haunted by the ghost of his dead wife, and the surgeon takes the rationalist and skeptical view. During one discussion, the topic of spiritualism arises: "He seems to have a leaning for metempsychosis and the doctrines of Pythagoras. In discussing them we touched upon modern spiritualism, and I made some joking allusion to the impostures of Slade, upon which, to my surprise, he warned me most impressively against confusing the innocent with the guilty, and argued that it would be as logical to brand Christianity as an error because Judas, who professed that religion, was a villain." In the story's climactic scene, the surgeon actually sees the ghost and learns, not that ghosts are real, but the more important lesson: "I have learned never to ridicule any man's opinion, however strange it may seem." It is not spiritualism that triumphs here, but tolerance.
The spiritualist connection is further cemented by the story's dedication: "To my friend Major-General A. W. Drayson, as a slight token of my admiration for his great and as yet unrecognized services to astronomy, this little volume is dedicated." A final detail, noted by Blinderman, is the name of the young protagonist: John M'Alister Ray.
V
- "Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood."
- A Study in Scarlet (1887)
"The Captain of the 'Pole-Star'" almost certainly includes a strong reaction to Edwin Ray Lankester's exposure of Slade and his subsequent blasting of spiritualism in general. It seems to me that, as Blinderman states, Doyle had his revenge upon Lankester in 1883 in this story, and it is unlikely that he continued to seethe about the matter for another 28 years.
More important is Doyle's attitude toward Lankester in 1912; The Lost World offers a clue. This is a lively adventure of four men who discover an isolated plateau on the upper Amazon on which time and evolution have been frozen: the plateau is populated by dinosaurs, primitive mammals, and a race of primitive man. As is common in Doyle's stories the narrator, Malone, is a relatively colourless character and the spotlight is reserved for a sympathetic, though frequently comic, portrait of a man of bizarre habits and prodigious talents, in this case Professor George Edward Challenger. Early in the tale Challenger refers Malone to a volume from his bookshelf: "This is an excellent monograph by my gifted friend, Ray Lankester!' said he." This statement by a sympathetic character seems to portray Lankester in a positive light, odd for a writer who has been contemplating revenge against him since 1876!
Doyle admitted that The Lost World was inspired by Lankester's book Extinct Animals, and that he had used the book as a reference while writing the novel.
As late as 1926, Doyle referred in print to "my friend Sir Ray Lankester." The occasion was a letter to The Times in response to Lankester's review of Doyle's History of Spiritualism. He calls the review "courteous," and corrects Sir Ray on a number of points. He questions the validity of the exposure of Slade in light of the fact that Slade subsequently performed before skeptical witnesses and was not caught. (Spiritualists seem to insist that a medium be exposed on every occasion: a single proof of fraud does not shake the believer's conviction that all of the other manifestations were genuine.) In tone the letter is polite and respectful, without a hint of animosity. He concludes: "I am sure that if Sir Ray Lankester, with his keen intellect, had devoted the same time to the research, and had enjoyed similar experiences, he would not have failed to come to the same conclusion."
Even assuming that this motive can still be defended, how did Doyle do? Did he really get his own back? According to Blinderman, Lankester was ambivalent about Piltdown:
- Sometimes, as in an article on the missing link, he claimed unity between cranium and jawbone.... On the other hand, at the Geological Society meeting, Lankester said that the jaw and cranium may not belong to the same individual. And after the Site II finds, he thought that perhaps some of that had come from the Piltdown pit. Even in his article, he adds a cautionary footnote. Lankester surmised that the skull was only 1,000 years old and that the mixture of fossils is to be accounted for by their having been carried by streams from different places into the one pit. I believe that his view was most clearly stated in a letter he wrote to H. G. Wells, 'I think we are stumped and baffled. The most prudent way is to keep the jaw and cranium apart in all argument about them.'"
This could be used, of course, as an argument in favour of Winslow's thesis: Doyle never publicly exposed the fraud because his trick backfired — the principal victim was not fooled-and he therefore had nothing to gain. I suspect, however, that it is more likely that were Doyle contemplating such a hoax for such a motive, he would have abandoned the plan simply because he could never be certain after all the effort required that Lankester would take the bait.
If we cannot rely on Ray Lankester as a suitable victim for Doyle's revenge, how about the rest of the scientific community: the "Materialists", and in particular, the evolutionists? Again we turn to The Lost World. Most of the characters in the story are scientists. How do they fare as a group? In the middle of this "Boy's Own Paper" yarn there is a great deal of satire, and scientists bear the brunt of this. Meetings of scientific societies are portrayed as rowdy shouting matches. The two main characters, Challenger and Professor Summerlee, are at each other's throats through most of the novel and their quirks are made the focus of much of the fun. At the same time, neither their intelligence nor the great advances of evolutionary science are ever questioned, and are in fact treated with some respect.
Other clues in Doyle's writing of the period point to a similar attitude. In a series of essays about his favourite books and authors, Through the Magic Door (1908), Doyle has this to say about Darwin's Journal of the Voyage of the Beagle:
- Any discerning eye must have detected long before the "Origin of Species" appeared, simply on the strength of this book of travel, that a brain of the first order, united with many rare qualities of character, had arisen. Never was there a more comprehensive mind. Nothing was too small and nothing too great for its alert observation. One page is occupied in the analysis of some peculiarity in the web of a minute spider, while the next deals with the evidence for the subsidence of a continent, and the extinction of a myriad animals. And his sweep of knowledge was so great, botany, geology, zoology, each lending its corroborative aid to the other. How a youth of Darwin's age he was only twenty-three when in the 1831 he started round the world on the surveying ship Beagle year could have acquired such a mass of information fills one with the same wonder, and is perhaps of the same nature, as the boy musician who exhibits by instinct the touch of the master.
These are not the words of an opponent of Darwin and his theories.
It could be argued that his target was not evolutionists in general, but only those who actively showed the intolerance of spiritualism that he had satirized in John M'Alister Ray. It seems unlikely, though, that he would have exacted a revenge which struck without prejudice the innocent as well as the guilty: this, too, was the lesson of "The Captain of the 'Pole-Star'".
VI
- Alighting at the small wayside station, we drove for some miles through the remains of widespread woods, which were once part of that great forest which for so long held the Saxon invaders at bay-the impenetrable "weald", for sixty years the bulwark of Britain.
- "The Adventure of Black Peter" (1904)
Of Doyle's proximity to the site of the hoax there is no question. Blinderman reports that it is a seventeen kilometer walk from Crowborough to Piltdown. All of the other suspects had similar access to the pit: of the nine other prime candidates, five lived near Piltdown.
Surprisingly, given the immense importance of the finds, there was only sporadic activity at the pit in the years 1912-15. Dawson, Teilhard, and Woodward seemed to work mostly on weekends, and at other times the only control over access to the site was provided by the Kenwards, the tenants at Barkham Manor, who harboured a general hostility toward strangers. On July 12, 1913, the Geologists Association held a picnic at Piltdown during which over 100 enthusiastic amateurs swarmed over the site.
The other suspects had one major advantage over Doyle in visiting the pit: anonymity. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was arguably England's most famous living writer, and was certainly a local celebrity. He could no more have made frequent visits to the pit without being spotted than could Robert Redford drop in for a pint with the lads at the local pub today.
The question of opportunity brings up that of alibi, and one might wonder where Sir Arthur was when the fake fossils were being planted. The problem with tracking this down is that Dawson seems to have been highly informal in his reporting of exactly where and when certain artifacts were found. The skull and jaw fragments might have been planted at any time between 1908 and 1911, and the associated fossils and flints might have been dropped at any time during or before the period 1912-14 when they were uncovered. For this reason alibi is not a fruitful topic of discussion concerning any of the suspects.
Sir Arthur certainly knew Dawson, who told him of the skull before it was announced in December 1912: the "drive me anywhere" letter is dated November 29. More later about Dawson's attitude toward Sir Arthur.
Much of Winslow's paper traces the possible provenance of the Piltdown artifacts, where they came from and how they might have come into Doyle's hands. There are a lot of examples here, but there is not one direct connection, not a shred of proof of Doyle actually having acquired one of the items. Note: he could have bought the skulls from Jessie Fowler; he could have acquired the orang-utan jaw from Cecil Wray; he in all probability stopped at Malta; he almost certainly visited Tunisia; he may have obtained the Gafsa flints from Norman Douglas; he could have picked up mammalian fossils during his golfing holidays. "None of the other individuals suspected of being the hoaxer is known to have visited these islands or Tunisia," he says.
Apparently Doyle is not "known to have" either. Winslow here is assuming what he is trying to prove. The italicized phrases in the previous paragraph are typical of his paper's style, a style which should be familiar to Sherlockians. Our magazines are crammed with tongue-in-cheek scholarship which aims to prove Holmes' association with almost any real or fictional character alive from 1850 to 1980: "no doubt Sir Winston leaned much upon Holmes' advice during the dark years of the war..." This kind of approach is fine in the context of The Game, but in the harsh light of day it is simply faulty reasoning. Not only must we doubt that Sir Arthur had the necessary fossils in his possession, we do not even know for sure if he visited the places where they were found!
Blinderman points out that it is not necessary to go to such elaborate lengths to locate faraway sources for the planted fossils and flints. There seemed to have been an ample supply of such materials right at home, from such diverse sources as the firms of Gerrard's and Stevens in London and the gravel-pit workers who sold the occasional dubious fossil to supplement their incomes. Doyle is no better placed than any of the other suspects to have acquired the necessary items from these sources.
The Jessie Fowler connection is particularly interesting. The phrenological Fowlers left England in the summer of 1896, taking their considerable collection of skulls and skull casts to New York with them. Jessie did indeed sell much of her collection, but not until years later when her fortunes began to falter. She returned to Britain on occasion to lecture and attend conferences, but it is unlikely that she would have brought skulls for sale on these brief trips. We must conclude that if Doyle bought a skull from Jessie Fowler, it was in 1896 or earlier, which means that he would have had the Piltdown skull in his possession for 12 years before he planted it.
There is little question that the hoaxer had access to a sizeable collection: there must have been experiments in staining and filing, and presumably some failures before the eventual successes. Aside from a little collection of local flints, we have no report of Sir Arthur collecting beaver teeth, hippo molars, old skulls, or ape jaws. And, remember, Windlesham saw many guests in those years.
The other Piltdown suspects had better access to collections: all were either known collectors, or were associated professionally with universities or museums.
VII
- "A touch! A distinct touch!" cried Holmes. "You are developing a certain unexpected vein of pawky humour, Watson, against which I must learn to guard myself."
- The Valley of Fear (1914)
I do not doubt Sir Arthur's familiarity with hoaxes and practical jokes, nor that of any man who is alive in the world. To the Nondescript hoax, of which Winslow seems to make much, we might add the famous "Balloon Hoax" of Edgar Allen Poe, one of Doyle's favourite authors. But being familiar with fakes doesn't make one a faker, any more than reading about robbery makes one a thief. Winslow notes with significance that Doyle was prone to practical jokes and thus fit the "personality profile" of the hoaxer very well. Don Cox's claim that Doyle's life and work were "singularly humorless" is surprising coming from one who has written a book about Sir Arthur's works. Many of the short stories are out-and-out comedies — "Crabbe's Practice" and "The Secret of Goresthorpe Grange" are notable examples and in others, such as The Stark Munro Letters, humour is a major component. Most of the Sherlock Holmes stories are enlivened with flashes of wit, as are the historical romances and the science fiction stories.
In particular, The Lost World can be read as an extended practical joke. It is written in the first person, and takes the form of the dispatches of a young newspaper reporter. The early editions of the work were peppered with authentic-looking maps, drawings, and photographs of the principals. Indeed the massive bearded figure of Professor Challenger that scowls at us from the frontispiece is none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in disguise! He had written to Strand editor H. Greenhough Smith in 1911:
- I think it will make the very best serial (bar special S. Holmes values) that I have ever done, especially when it has its trimming of faked photos, maps, and plans. My ambition is to do for the boys' book what Sherlock Holmes did for the detective tale. I don't suppose I could bring off two such coups. And yet I hope it may. (Quoted in Carr.)
Smith thought the "trimming" a bit much, and feared that the Strand might be accused of mounting a hoax. Doyle replied:
- Very well. Not a word about the photo of Prof. C. I begin to realize my own audacity. After all, it is not me. I am only a block on which an imaginary figure has been built up. But don't give it away. (Quoted in Carr.)
Nonetheless, he remained fond of his Challenger disguise, and later tried it out on his sister Connie and her husband; they were reportedly not amused.
In spite of all this talk of fakery, the book is clearly a work of fiction unlike Poe's "Balloon Hoax," a story about a trans-Atlantic balloon flight which was published as a legitimate news item by the New York Sun in 1844 and which plainly was designed to deceive. It is all the more surprising, then, that the Pennsylvania Museum outfitted an expedition in 1914 to the upper Amazon to find Professor Challenger's plateau!
Another of Doyle's fictions caused a stir some years earlier when it was believed to be true. His 1884 "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" is the fictional deposition of a passenger of the ill-fated and very real brigantine Marie Celeste which was found abandoned off the coast of Africa. The story was published in The Cornhill, anonymously as was the magazine's custom, and its readers had fun guessing who had written it (many suspected Robert Louis Stevenson). Solly Flood, the British advocate general in Gibraltar, wrote indignantly that the whole thing was a fabrication, and whoever this Jephson fellow was he knew nothing of the facts of the case. Someone pointed out to Flood, one suspects none too gently, that the story was fiction. Doyle had a good laugh at the affair, and confessed himself amazed that his writing carried such conviction that someone would actually believe it.
Even later in life, when Sir Arthur was obsessed with bringing the truths of spiritualism to the world, he never lost his sense of fun. Pearson reports that on June 2, 1922, at the American Club of Magicians in New York, Doyle showed some of the stop-motion animated dinosaur sequences from the upcoming film of The Lost World. He chose not to explain where the films came from until the next day, after the New York Times had reported:
- DINOSAURS CAVORT IN FILM FOR Doyle
- SPIRITIST MYSTIFIES WORLD-FAMED MAGICIANS WITH
- PICTURES OF PREHISTORIC BEASTS —
- KEEPS ORIGIN A SECRET —
- MONSTERS OF OTHER AGES SHOWN,
- SOME FIGHTING, SOME AT PLAY,
- IN THEIR NATIVE JUNGLES
These examples, with the exception of the Jephson incident, which we may discard since it was clearly accidental, show two things about Doyle's practical jokes: that their intent was simply to have some harmless fun, and that they were either so transparent as to not require exposure or they were exposed by Doyle himself almost immediately. Piltdown, however, was not done simply for laughs. Says Weiner: "The planning of a sequence of events of this degree of elaborateness, of a watchfulness of the reactions of the scientific community from the days of the first meeting onwards, must betoken a motive more driving than a mere hoax or prank." I agree. And so too, oddly enough, does Winslow, for he attributes Doyle's actions to revenge, not fun. Consequently, I believe we can disregard Doyle's sense of humour as a factor in support of Winslow's case.
While we are on the subject of character, we should ask if this method of achieving justice for past wrongs is consistent with Sir Arthur's personality. There are many examples in his life of his reactions to perceived injustices. In the case of the British conduct in the Congo, the trials of Oscar Slater and George Edalji, Bernard Shaw's letter in the press on the behaviour of passengers and crew during the Titanic disaster, Doyle responded swiftly and characteristically: he wrote. His pamphlets were printed at his own expense by the thousands, and he refused a penny of profit from their sale. He wrote letters to the press. He lectured, lobbied, organized. What better example than his last and most ambitious campaign, his crusade for spiritualism?
Of personal wrongs such as that inflicted by his former fellow medical student and mentor, George Budd, Doyle chose a more gentle revenge: satire. In The Stark Munro Letters, "Crabbe's Practice," and to some extent, the Challenger stories, he builds fascinating characters on the foundation of Budd's foibles. His battles were always fought very much in the public view. Supported by an unshakeable conviction of the rightness of his views, he had no need for private squabbling, and he believed that the great British public would in the end support him.
No, I'm afraid that skulking around Sussex with flints in his pocket was simply not Sir Arthur's way.
VIII
- I may have commented upon my friend's power of mental detachment, but never have I wondered at it more than upon that spring morning in Cornwall when for two hours he discoursed upon celts, arrowheads, and shards, as lightly as if no sinister mystery were waiting for his solution.
- "The Devil's Foot" (1910)
Sir Arthur was certainly interested in paleontology. He was also interested in history, coins, botany, geology, ancient languages, cryptology, philology, Chaldean roots in the ancient Cornish language, photography, miniature railways, and several sports including cricket, soccer, boxing, billiards, bowls, cycling, and golf. This interest, however, does not implicate him in this paleontological fake.
Winslow's contention that Doyle had a "fascination with jaws" and skulls is really quite difficult to take seriously, although Christopher Redmond has pointed out that he writes a great deal about mutilated and distorted faces.
The discovery of the heap of jaw casts in the house in Portsmouth seems to have come from The Stark Munro Letters, since I can find it mentioned nowhere in any of the other biographical material. (Dame Jean Conan Doyle in her letter to Science 83 states flatly that it is fiction.) Separating fact from fiction in this delightful book is problematical at best, but this incident has a certain bizarre ring of truth to it, so let's assume it really happened. Does the incident seem to have engendered an interest in jaws? If we really want to know Doyle's reaction to the event, we should ask what the impecunious young doctor did with the collection he found himself heir to. Did he study them and dust them off for his display case?
- I bought a one-and-ninepenny broom and set to work. You notice that I am precise about small sums, because just there lies the whole key of the situation. In the yard I found a zinc pail with a hole in it, which was most useful, for by its aid I managed to carry up all the jaws with which my kitchen was heaped. Then with my new broom, my coat hung on a gas-bracket and my shirt-sleeves turned to the elbow, I cleaned out the lower rooms and the hall, brushing the refuse into the yard.
He threw them out! Some "fascination"!
Whether or not the incident really happened, one could argue that Doyle added it to the novel precisely because of his fascination with jaws. Certainly if it was fictional, it may have grown from his frequent treatment of patients with jaw ailments referred to him by his dentist neighbour. (Green provides confirmation of this.)
I believe it is more likely that he chose to include it because finding a pile of jaws while exploring alone an otherwise empty house appealed to his sometimes macabre sense of humour. (It certainly appealed to mine!) Less than ten years later this supposed preoccupation with jaws was to lead him to his medical specialty: ophthalmology!
I have been unable to track down the story containing the "jawman", but then Doyle wrote many stories about doctors: there are 15, for example, in Round the Red Lamp (1898), and none of these seem to mention a jaw specialist.
It is odd that Winslow should illustrate what he calls an "abiding interest in human jaws" with a single example out of all of Doyle's considerable output during the 50 years of his writing career. Nonetheless, this one example suggested to me that there may be more. What followed was the somewhat ludicrous activity-though not unparalleled in Sherlockian research of a grown man poring through the Canon looking for the word "jaw." The results were not supportive of Winslow's theory. The late unlamented Enoch Drebber of A Study in Scarlet had a "prognathous jaw"; the description of Dr. Leslie Armstrong in "The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter" notes "the granite moulding of the inflexible jaw;" Colonel Sebastian Moran, brought to bay in "The Empty House," sports "the brow of a philosopher above and the jaw of a sensualist below." Within Doyle's many character descriptions, however, these few examples hold no special significance among the eyes, ears, hair, beards, faces, arms, legs, and other assorted body parts. I cannot conclude that the human jaw held any special importance for Doyle.
There is no doubt of Sir Arthur's interest in phrenology, the pseudo-science in which the external conformation of the skull supposedly provides clues to the development and position of the organs belonging to the various mental faculties. A report of his phrenological reading by Jessie Fowler herself was published in the April 1897 issue of the Phrenological Journal. But phrenology was popular, even respectable among many thinkers of the late nineteenth century-Alfred Russel Wallace, for example, was a believer — so Doyle was in good company. This interest in heads, however, has no more to do with the Piltdown skull than if he had owned a pair of Head skis!
The question of the skill of the hoaxer has divided Piltdown students. Many feel that the forgeries, though clumsy in some respects, required considerable skill. Weiner, in his assessment of the forger's abilities, indicates: "We require in our perpetrator no special technical qualities other than those of a sound, well-versed geologist and paleontologist..."; the scheme was, he felt, carefully planned and elaborately executed. Blinderman and others, on the other hand, find it a clumsy and unsubtle fraud. The hoax appears to me to be elaborate, certainly, and requiring at least the skill of a dedicated amateur.
Did Sir Arthur's medical training provide him with the required knowledge? Dr. Alvin E. Rodin thinks not. In a personal communication, he notes that none of the references to skulls in The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Lost World are sufficiently detailed to indicate that Doyle was familiar with the morphology of primitive skulls. He believes that the anthropological content of the standard medical course would not provide enough information to permit a graduate to alter the orangutan skull so convincingly. He continues: "I am also a medical school graduate who is interested in anthropology and who has visited the Piltdown site-but this in no way makes me an expert in the area nor the culprit."
Other knowledge in addition to that of anthropology was also needed by the hoaxer. In a British Museum file, Blinderman found a number of letters from Dawson to Woodward in which Doyle's name arises. These seem to be the only evidence of the relationship between Dawson and Doyle, and they reveal Dawson's impressions of Doyle's abilities as a field worker. On one occasion, Doyle, with much excitement, showed Dawson a fossil he had found:
- I regret to say it was a mere concretion of oxide of iron and sand. Sir Conan and the ladies pointed out several "striking resemblances" to the "carcasses" of various animals, all mutually destructive!
- But the visit was not altogether lost for as I was trying to draw Sir Conan away from the hope of finding much in the Sandstone and directing his attention to the drift deposits above I espied a beautiful flint arrowhead embedded, and in view of us all.
- Subsequently we found worked flints; and so I started him off on a new and I hope more fruitful enterprise.
- I was so sorry at his disappointment he is such a good fellow-but the new find revived him a lot. Of course, I have given him the arrowhead and a little flint saw I found at Crowborough (a mile away) some years ago. They are both late neolithic and no use to us, but being found so near to him he is very interested.
This was in November, 1911, long after Dawson had received the first pieces of the Piltdown skull and months before he first wrote to Woodward about them. The impression one gets is that Dawson quite liked Sir Arthur, but despaired of his archeological skills. On another occasion, Doyle thought that an entire iguanadon had been found at Crowborough; Dawson corrected him: it was a rock. In early 1912, Doyle discussed his plans for The Lost World with Dawson, who wrote to Woodward: "I hope someone has sorted out his fossils for him!" (Quoted in Blinderman.)
If one accepts Dawson's assessment, the perpetration of the Piltdown fraud was not within the abilities of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Though in hindsight the fraud was not skilfully executed, a considerable knowledge of the anatomy of primitive hominids, of the effects of age upon bone, and of the appropriate index fossils and implements to plant were still required in order for the forgery to be even the slightest bit convincing. Doyle's knowledge seems to be limited to identifying-under Dawson's tutelage some of the local paleolithic flints.
To assess Doyle's expertise in the use of potassium bichromate, we must refer to his M.D. thesis, On the vasomotor influence in tabes dorsalis and on the influence which is exerted by the sympathetic nervous system in that disease, being a thesis presented in the hope of obtaining the degree of the Doctorship of Medicine of the University of Edinburgh, prepared in the early 1880's while Doyle was practising medicine in Portsmouth. The relevant passage reads:
- For microscopic examination the cord may be hardened in Muller's fluid (one part of sodium sulphate and two and a half of potass. bichromate in a hundred of water), or in osmic acid which stains the myelin sheath of the central nerve fibre, or in ammoniacal solution of carmine as used by Vulpian and Charcot which stains the connective tissue and not the nerve tubules. It is perhaps better simply to freeze the cord in a microtome so as to avoid the possibility of all chemical alterations. (p. 18) (2)
Dr. Rodin writes that Doyle was not reporting on his own original research here, but was conducting a review of the literature. Doyle wrote elsewhere in the thesis of the diffidence engendered in the researcher-that is, himself "when enforced residence in a provincial town cuts him off from those pathological and histological aids which might enable him to strengthen his arguments."
The four techniques for preparing histological sections that Doyle mentions were all well known, says Dr. Rodin, to any medical school graduate of the period. It is certainly not apparent from the thesis that Doyle had any special expertise in this area.
In addition, the thesis describes the use of potassium bichromate for preparing nerve tissue for microscopic examination; it does not necessarily upon bone follow that the compound would have the desired aging effect fragments. If this was the extent of Doyle's expertise in this area, some direct experimentation would be required. Doyle's fellow suspects, who were all experienced amateur or professional archaeologists, were accustomed to using potassium bichromate to harden and preserve specimens, and so would already be aware of its effect on bone. All this seems to place Sir Arthur a few rungs lower on the ladder of suspicion.
IX
- "It won't do, Watson!" said he with a laugh. "Let us walk along the cliffs together and search for flint arrows. We are more likely to find them than clues to this problem."
- "The Devil's Foot" (1910)
I believe that the similarities between The Lost World and the Piltdown episode are more easily explained than Winslow claims.
The general milieu of the novel, a primitive earth, grows naturally from Doyle's interest in paleontology. He had made casts of iguanadon footprints discovered near his home, he was fascinated by the primitive creatures of Lankester's book, and he had made the acquaintance of Dawson whose enthusiasm was known to be contagious.
The references to early man and missing links are easily due to the recent discoveries of primitive hominids and the much-discussed assumption that there were more to come.
The references to hoaxes are not surprising given the context of the story and the nature of the protagonists; I quite frankly have no difficulty in attributing the similarity between these passing references and the forgery at Piltdown to a simple coincidence. (The statement about "you can fake a bone as easily as you can a photograph" is ironic since in later years Doyle, who was a skilled amateur photographer, would be repeatedly taken in by the simplest of bogus spirit photographs.)
Winslow seems to believe that the similarities between the Amazon plateau of the novel and the Weald of Piltdown fame strongly implicate Sir Arthur in the hoax. Surely a more likely explanation for the undoubted use of Sussex is that he lived there!
The similarities between characters in the novel and people from Doyle's past and present circle of acquaintances is no surprise: it is a common fictional device, and one that Doyle himself used o frequent occasions: Sherlock Holmes was based on Doyle's old teacher, Professor Joe Bell, with a good deal of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle thrown in as well; Cullingworth in The Stark Munro Letters is modelled after Doyle's medical colleague George Budd.
X
- I shook my head. "Many men have been hanged on far slighter evidence," I remarked.
- "So they have. And many men have been wrongfully hanged."
- "The Boscombe Valley Mystery" (1891)
Many of us have fallen into the same trap. Searching for a thesis for a Sherlockian paper we chance upon an odd coincidence. Searching farther, we find something else that supports the connection. Before long we are weaving a tangled web of, let's face it, tenuous evidence to prove that (to take a random example) Sherlock Holmes was an amateur conjurer. It is all great fun, and it is truly surprising how much can be achieved by just bending a deduction or stretching an association here and there.
In the real world, however, this just won't do. Evidence has to be more than just suggestive, and the logic that ties the evidence together must be incontrovertible. It is particularly odious when shoddy techniques are used to malign the character of someone who is incapable of defense.
When I began this investigation, I had no idea what paths it might follow. I was vaguely unconvinced, but I was prepared to follow the evidence where it might lead. It leads nowhere. If you are still tempted by the sheer quantity of Winslow's arguments, remember that any number, even a large number, when multiplied by zero gives zero.
So who really was the culprit? Alas, this paper is not the place, nor am I able, to add anything new to the question. I recommend Charles Blinderman's book as an excellent starting point for those who wish to explore further. It may be that, like the identity of Jack the Ripper or the true location of Watson's wound, this is a mystery that will never be completely solved.
Piltdown scholars have largely ignored the Conan Doyle theory and, we have seen, with good reason. After reviewing the so-called evidence, we would be advised to do the same.
Notes
(1) Slade was sentenced to three months in jail, but escaped from England before the sentence could be carried out. He was caught cheating again in Belleville, Ontario in 1882.
(2) I am indebted to Dr. Alvin E. Rodin for providing me with this passage, for his comments and for his analysis of Conan Doyle's thesis in The Medical Casebook of Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle (see Bibliography.)
(3) Shameless self-promotion: You can find The Link as a Kindle ebook on Amazon.
Afterword — 2017
A lot of water has flowed under the metaphorical bridge since I wrote the original Curious Incident back in 1988. New Piltdown suspects have been thrust forward and intricate theories propounded. But the bottom line is-admit it, you were going to skip down to the end anyway, weren't you?-the culprit remains elusive. And Arthur Conan Doyle is still on the short list of suspects, in spite of the weakness of the evidence.
Let me summarize the major events in the Piltdown Man story since 1988.
Frank Spencer's 1990 book Piltdown: A Scientific Forgery, is a thorough, academic review of the history of the affair and a dispassionate examination of the suspects. Spencer (1941-1999), an anthropologist at Queens College, CUNY, New York, believed that the culprit was Sir Arthur Keith. With respect to Conan Doyle, Spencer poked numerous holes in Winslow's argument and concluded, "Presuming that Doyle did, indeed have the ability, why did he not spring the trap he is supposed to have so carefully set for Lankester? It is submitted that the reason was because the trap was not set in the first place." Spencer's companion volume, The Piltdown Papers, reprints the original correspondence and other essential historical documents. Together the two volumes are an essential resource for any Piltdown scholar.
In 1996 an old canvas traveling trunk was discovered under the roof of the Natural History Museum. Inside was a collection of bones stained and carved like the Piltdown artefacts. The outside of the trunk bore the initials "M.A.C.H.": Martin A. C. Hinton, a curator of zoology at the museum at the time of the fraud. Brian Gardiner, professor of palaeontology at King's College, London, took it as irrefutable proof that Hinton was the forger. The trunk seemed to contain Hinton's trial "fossils", created as he refined the process that would eventually produce the fraudulent Piltdown pieces. Martin Hinton had been investigated by the original discoverers of the fraud back in 1953 and quickly discounted as a suspect. Any evidence pointing to him was highly circumstantial and based on gossip. This new evidence seemed at first blush to be conclusive.
But there are other explanations for how the stained bones got into Martin Hinton's trunk, and the general feeling now among researchers is that the case against him has yet to be proven. Regrettably, the new light shone on Hinton did not diminish the glare aimed at Conan Doyle.
Nineteen ninety-six was a busy year in the Piltdown Man world. Early year, Robert B. Anderson, earth science editor at Natural History in the magazine of the American Museum of Natural History, revived Winslow's attack on the creator of Sherlock Holmes. His claim appeared in Pacific Discovery magazine, a publication of the San Francisco-based California Academy of Sciences. His new evidence: words and pictures in Conan Doyle's novel, The Lost World, that seemed to point to the Piltdown affair. Both the novel and the fraud made their public appearances in 1912.
Anderson's by-line may have been on the article, but the man behind the curtain, the author of this new theory, was a historian of science named Richard Milner. I will not dissect their arguments here. My rejoinder, "Baker Street Meets Piltdown Man", (co-authored with Roy Pilot), appeared in The Baker Street Journal, 46:4, December, 1996, where we demonstrate that, like Winslow's arguments, the theory of Milner and Anderson does not hold up to examination.
The problem for those of us trying to let the facts speak for Conan Doyle is that Milner has never committed his theory to print. He has lectured extensively about it, and is enough of a showman to have garnered the repeated attention of the media, but Pacific Discovery is the only outlet where his arguments have ever appeared. So if he has any proper evidence, we'll probably never know.
That same year saw the publication of an important new book on the subject: Unraveling Piltdown, by John Evangelist Walsh. Though it appeared too soon to benefit from the discovery of Hinton's trunk or the Pacific Discovery article, it nonetheless became the go-to reference for all matters Piltdown. Using close observation and solid logic ("You know my methods, Watson!"), he examines the case for each prominent suspect. As loopy as the Conan Doyle accusations appear, Walsh nonetheless takes them seriously enough to consider them, investing twenty pages in his analysis. Covering most of the points of this monograph, and adding some key arguments of his own, he concludes: "Patient investigation of Winslow's charge stands firmly against any slightest possibility of Doyle's guilt. The creator of Sherlock Holmes was not the fabricator of Piltdown." Who actually dunnit? Walsh, like so many before and since, points the finger directly at Charles Dawson and argues his case convincingly.
By 2003, little had changed in the foggy world of Piltdown Man: Arthur Conan Doyle was still being cited as a possible perpetrator, and the much-sought-after smoking gun had yet to appear. That year a new voice emerged, examining the controversy from a new perspective and soon becoming a recognized expert on the matter. Archaeologist Miles Russell, a senior lecturer at Bournemouth University, reviewed the life work of Charles Dawson in the light of the man's final, greatest discovery. He reveals, in Piltdown Man: the secret life of Charles Dawson, that prior to 1912 Dawson had a long history of copying the work of others and announcing "landmark" finds of dubious credibility. The only thing preventing scholars from labeling Dawson's finds as fraudulent was the sketchy details that Dawson provided about the circumstances of their discovery. Under Russell's analysis, Piltdown Man emerges as merely the last in a series of fabricated antiquities created by the enigmatic Dawson. Russell hammers home the final nail in the case against Dawson by conducting a detailed analysis of the timeline and by noting that Dawson was the only suspect who had documented contact with all of the artefacts. Russell reluctantly examines the case against Conan Doyle-"if only for completeness sake"-and finds it wanting. Although we know that Dawson and Conan Doyle were acquaintances, the only connection between The Lost World and Piltdown Man would seem to be that hearing about the novel may have inspired Dawson to commit the fraud, to manufacture the "big find" he had always sought.
Russell describes his 2012 follow-up book, Piltdown Man Hoax: Case Closed, as a "Why or How-dunnit", exploring Dawson's motivations and actions.
In 2011 I was invited by the Friends of the Arthur Conan Doyle Collection of the Toronto Public Library to participate in their symposium, A Study In Scandal, a major weekend event that examined all things scandalous about Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle. Being unable to travel from Sydney to Toronto, I put my arguments in the form of a video which was subsequently posted on YouTube. (See https://youtu.be/BI9qWMerWWI and https://youtu.be/MuCJBtx WTJQ In 2012 another new book based about the Piltdown hoax was destined to raise not a ripple in the general discussion. My historical novel, The Link, was a thriller set among the events leading up to the announcement of the Piltdown finds in 1912. The book features Arthur Conan Doyle in a minor role and reveals the true hoaxer in its explosive conclusion. The work did not advance the struggle to answer the Piltdown question a single millimeter, but it was fun to write. (3)
Still in 2012, the Natural History Museum assembled a team of 15 scientists, led by the museum's human origins expert Chris Stringer, to take another look at the artefacts on the 100th anniversary of their first public appearance. Employing modern analytical techniques such as DNA analysis, radioisotope studies, radiocarbon dating methods and spectroscopy, the team hoped to reach new insights into the hoax that were not possible with the technologies available in 1953.
In August 2016 the results of the study were published. Couched in scientific hedging ("results are consistent with", "we consider it highly likely that"...), the paper nonetheless makes some startling discoveries. It turns out that the same method had been used to prepare all of the phony specimens, such as packing gravel into gaps in the teeth and using putty to repair damage and hold the gravel plugs in place. This unity of method points to a single individual as forger. The study also concludes that the ape materials from both Piltdown Site I and Site II likely originate from the same animal. As the Site I Piltdown specimens were only found when Charles Dawson was present, and as he is the only person who knew the location of Site II, this makes it hard to blame anyone else for the hoax.
It is significant that in the fourteen pages of this authoritative report, the name Arthur Conan Doyle does not appear even once.
In the years since 1988 I was luckily able to finally view the Piltdown materials. On two occasions, thanks to generosity of the custodians of the collection at the Natural History Museum, I was permitted to examine, photograph and handle the materials as much as I wished. It's hard to describe the very personal feeling of touching a piece of history, joining the chain of human contact stretching back to the Piltdown forger and all the investigators since.
It is perhaps fortunate that the 2016 study was unable to find enough viable human DNA in the pieces to conduct an analysis: they may have concluded that the fraudster was a male of British heritage whose ancestors had at some point emigrated to Canada.
On one of my rare visits to England, I also spent three days in the historic Sussex town of Lewes, home to the famous Lewes Castle and the infamous Charles Dawson. It is easy to imagine how the place would have looked and felt in 1912, and I was left with many strong impressions that flavoured my novel, The Link.
It now seems highly unlikely that any new data will emerge to alter the prevailing view that Charles Dawson alone committed history's most famous scientific fraud. This is a good thing. It means that, after thirty-four years of baseless accusations against the creator of Sherlock Holmes, we can at last confidently conclude that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is completely innocent of the crime.
Bibliography — 2017
In the interest of readability, I have avoided peppering the text with footnotes. It is, nonetheless, important that the reader have some idea where I have been in my research, both so that he can check up on my facts, and so that he can, if he wishes, explore the field in new directions. Along with some of the sources mentioned, I have added a few words of comment.
CONAN DOYLE'S LIFE AND WORK
- Lycett, Andrew: Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes; London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007.
- Stashower, Daniel: Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle. New York, Henry Holt & Co. 1999.
- Edwards, Owen Dudley. The Quest for Sherlock Holmes. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1983. A detailed and thought-provoking examination of Doyle's early career, packed with new discoveries and insights.
- Klinger, Leslie S.: The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. Three volumes. New York: W.W. Norton, 2004 & 2005.
- Gibson, John Michael, and Richard Lancelyn Green. The Unknown Conan Doyle: Letters to the Press. London: Secker and Warburg, 1986. Here I found Doyle's response to the review by Sir Ray Lankester.
- Green, Richard Lancelyn (ed.) The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes. Penguin Books, 1983. Almost half of this collection consists of the editor's notes which contain many biographical gems about Sir Arthur and his works.
- Hall, Trevor H. "Conan Doyle and Spiritualism", in Sherlock Holmes and his Creator. London: Gerald Duckworth and Company, 1978. I have always enjoyed Hall's writings on Doyle and Holmes and this article is solidly researched and well thought-out, as usual.
- Redmond, Christopher. In Bed With Sherlock Holmes. Toronto: Simon and Pierre Publishing, 1984. A well-written exploration of sexual elements in the Canon, it discusses Doyle's fascination with mangled faces.
- Rodin, Alvin E., M.D., M.Sc., F.R.C.P(C) and Jack D. Key, M.A., M.S. Medical Casebook of Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle: From Practitioner to Sherlock Holmes and Beyond. Malabar, Florida: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, Inc., 1984. Of particular interest to the Piltdown affair is the analysis of Doyle's M.D. thesis.
- Rodin, Alvin E. & Jack D. Key: Adventuring in England with Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle. Beavercreek, Ohio: KeyRod Literary Enterprises, 1986. Includes a description of the author's visit to the Piltdown site.
CONAN DOYLE HIMSELF
- Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. "The Captain of the 'Pole-Star'". In Conan Doyle's Best Books. New York: P. F. Collier and Son. A three-volume collection of Doyle's pre-copyright stories and novels.
- ————, The Stark Munro Letters. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1895. An amusing story, heavy with autobiographical details, of the life and philosophical musings of a young doctor as he struggles to establish a practice.
- ————, Round the Red Lamp. London. Methuen, 1898. A collection of Doyle's medical stories.
- ————, Through the Magic Door. New York. The McLure Company, 1908. Deals with Doyle's favourite literary works and their authors. Some of these essays were originally published as a magazine series called "Before My Bookcase", in 1894.
- ————, The Lost World. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1912
- ————, "A Test Message". Light. August 27, 1927. A reprint of Doyle's letter of July 2, 1887.
PILTDOWN
This does not pretend to be a definitive biography (for that, see Bate, below) but covers the milestone publications and documents that mention Conan Doyle in the Piltdown context.
- Anderson, Robert B.: "The Case of the Missing Link". Pacific Discovery; 49:2, Spring 1996.
- David G. Bate: An annotated select bibliography of the Piltdown forgery. Keyworth, Nottingham: British Geological Survey, 2014. Currently the most complete bibliography of Piltdown-related publications. Available online at http://nora.nerc.ac.uk/507543/
- Blinderman, Charles: The Piltdown Inquest. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1986. This was Piltdown up-to-date in 1988 and is still an invaluable reference work for this paper. Blinderman is apparently so unimpressed with Winslow's argument that he does not even bother with a serious refutation: instead he writes an amusing short story in which Holmes and Watson are called upon by Sir Arthur to settle the matter.
- Spencer, Frank: Piltdown: a scientific forgery. London: Oxford & New York: Natural History Museum Publications / Oxford University Press, 1990.
- Spencer, Frank: The Piltdown papers: the correspondence and other documents relating to the Piltdown forgery, 1908-1955. London: Oxford & New York: Natural History Museum Publications/Oxford University Press, 1990.
- Walsh, John Evangelist: Unraveling Piltdown: the science fraud of the century and its solution. New York & Toronto: Random House, 1996.
- Weiner, J. S. The Piltdown Forgery. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955. Written at the time of the exposure of the hoax by one of the principals of the exposure, this remains an excellent introduction to the affair.
- Winslow, John and Alfred Meyer. "The Perpetrator at Piltdown". Science 83, Volume 4, No. 7, September 1983. American Association for the Advancement of Science. See also the November issue, which contains the letters of reaction referred to above.
- Winslow, John, "Winslow Replies to Critics". Letter to the Baltimore Sun, September 5, 1983. In this letter, Winslow defends his claim that Doyle was a committed spiritualist as early as 1887. Regrettably, I was unable to locate the August 23 issue containing the letter from Ralph E. Edwards to which Winslow was replying.
- Boswell, Rolfe. "Skull-Diggery at Piltdown: A Baker Street Irregularity". The Baker Street Journal. Vol 13, No. 3, September, 1963.
- Durrenberger, E. Paul. "More About Holmes and the Piltdown Problem". The Baker Street Journal. Vol 15, No. 1, March, 1965.
- Russell, Miles: Piltdown Man: the secret life of Charles Dawson & the world's greatest archaeological hoax. Stroud, U.K.: Tempus.
- Russell, Miles: The Piltdown Man Hoax: Case Closed. Stroud, U.K.: The History Press.
GENERAL REFERENCE
- Coover, John E. "Metaphysics and the Incredulity of Psychologists: Psychical Research Before 1927" in The Case For and Against Psychical Belief. Worcester, Mass.: Clark University Press, 1927. Includes the history of Slade's exposures.
- Hardwick, Michael. The Complete Guide to Sherlock Holmes. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1986. In spite of its somewhat hyperbolic title, this is a valuable source of quotations from the Canon, for those of us with less than encyclopedic memories. A good index, too.
- Stern, Madelaine B. Heads and Headlines: The Phrenological Fowlers. University of Oklahoma Press, 1971. Contains the history of the Fowler family, including Jessie's life in England and New York.
- Stern, Madelaine B. The Game's A Head. Paulette Green, Rockville Center, New York, 1983. Reveals the details of Sir Arthur's phrenological reading at the hands of Jessie Fowler.
- Tracy, Jack. The Encyclopedia Sherlockiana. New York: Avon Books, 1977, 1979. The best of the encyclopedias.
Postpublication Addenda
[ This leaf was added to the book seaprately. ]
A couple of points came to my attention following publication of this edition. I am grateful to Jon Lellenberg for passing these observations and corrections along.
Page 20: I note that "Green provides confirmation" (1) that some of Conan Doyle's early patients in Southsea with jaw ailments were referred to him by his dentist neighbour. Richard Lancelyn Green's original source was probably an undated (but late 1882) letter from Conan Doyle to his medical mentor Dr. Reginald Ratcliff Hoare in which he says "A dentist over the road named Kirton too has proved himself a great trump and sends me on anything he can." (2)
Page 21: The letter by Peter Costello and Dame Jean Conan Doyle rebutting Winslow was not, in fact, published subsequently in the Baker Street Journal. Actually it was published in Baker Street Miscellanea, No. 49, Spring 1987. My error.
Page 35: When I wrote the original paper I was unable to find any evidence that there really was a cache of jaw casts left by the previous occupant of Conan Doyle's house in Portsmouth. Jon Lellenberg, who has access to many letters from Conan Doyle covering this period in his life, written to his mother, to family friends and to Dr. Hoare,3 reports that none of them contain any mention of such discovery at Bush Villas. This confirms my original theory that the pile of jaw casts story is pure fiction for, had it really happened, I cannot imagine Conan Doyle keeping it a secret from his correspondents.
Page 36: Re: "I have been unable to track down the story containing the 'jawman"". The story is, in fact, "A Medical Document". The relevant sentence: "[Hargrave] calls himself a jawman, 'a mere jawman,' as he modestly puts it, but in point of fact he is too young and too poor to confine himself to a specialty..." There are no further references to jaws in that story.
Doug Elliott
Newport NSW
January 2018
1. Specifically in The Uncollected Sherlock Holmes, p12.
2. Lellenberg, Jon, Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley. Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters; New York: The Penguin Press, 2007. Pp. 180-181. The letter itself is in the New York Public Library's Berg Collection.
3. Admirably documented in Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters.
4. In the collection of Conan Doyle's medical stories, Round the Red Lamp; London: Methuen & Co, 1894. p203.
