One is tempted to caricature Fitzroy. Still, whatever his faults, the man was not a simpleton. He came from a distinguished family, which perhaps proves nothing, but he had traveled around the world on the survey ship Beagle once before, and had been appointed a captain at the age of twenty-three. His surveys were accurate and highly valued, and he was a Fellow of the Royal Society. It is said, too, that after getting to know Darwin he changed his opinion. All the same, no matter how hard you try to look without prejudice upon Captain Fitzroy, it seems best to admit that this is an individual you cannot love.
However, the important thing is the debate, not the audience, and those traditional opponents Science and Religion once again entered the arena when Thomas Huxley challenged Soapy Sam.
It is the scientist, of course, armed with some impertinent fact, who attacks first—though the maneuver may be oblique or heavily veiled. Then the ecclesiastic must counterattack, for the very good reason that he perceives a threat to his office and to his life’s work. The status quo must be protected, the heretical march of knowledge obstructed, whether it be the development of anesthetics, the experiments of Galileo, or the deductions of infamous bulb-nosed naturalists.
Both attitudes are easy to understand. Science feels obligated to inquire, whereas the Church comes armed with infallible dogma.
Thus we have Dr. John Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge and Master of Saint Catherine’s, nailing down the particulars in Archbishop Ussher’s article of faith: “Heaven and earth, center and circumference were created all together and in the same instant, clouds full of water. This took place, and Man was created by the Trinity on the 23rd October, 4004 B.C. at 9 o’clock in the morning.”
Gilgamesh the Sumerian may have been eating ham and eggs at that hour, but never mind; what impresses us is Dr. Lightfoot’s stately assurance.
By contrast, old Darwin frets about each mistake he makes, telling us he is ready to weep with vexation, referring to himself as “the most miserable, bemuddled, stupid dog in all England.” He goes then, we are informed, and walks through the winter morning—this aloof old genius—walking by himself and meditating, so early that he startles foxes trotting to their lairs at dawn.
Accompanying these famous champions we now and again meet an individual who, like some overexcited spectator at a wrestling match, resolves to assert himself by clambering into the ring. Consider a certain Denis or Didier Henrion, a seventeenth-century French engineer, who measured various bones that probably came from a brontosaurus and then announced without qualification that our progenitor Adam stood 123 feet, 9 inches tall. Eve, he said, had been five feet shorter. M. Henrion did not calculate their weight, which is too bad, nor Eve’s other measurements, which must have been formidable; but what we would like to know most of all is why he positioned himself so awkwardly in the path of common sense.
Then we have the case of a respected historian named von Eckhart.
Early in the eighteenth century Professor Johannes Bartolomaus Beringer who taught natural history at the University of Würzburg, and who collected fossils, dug up hundreds of stones containing the imprint of fruits, flowers, spiders, turtles, snakes, frogs, and so forth. He studied them carefully because he had never seen anything like them and he therefore assumed that his report would have unusual scientific value. He published his conclusions in a handsome book titled Lithographiae Wirceburgensis, illustrated with twenty-two plates of the finest specimens. Unfortunately, von Eckart had persuaded some boys to carve and bury these fakes where Professor Beringer would be sure to find them.
It was a practical joke born of petulant dislike for Beringer, yet something beyond malice seems to have been involved: there is an undertone of hostility toward science.
This brings up the American Goliath, born of animosity toward hard-shell Protestants. An Iowa cigar manufacturer named Hull and a preacher named Turk argued about giants in the earth. Reverend Turk of course defended the Bible. Hull, choking with disgust, resolved to mock him as viciously as Eckhart had mocked Beringer.
In the summer of 1868 Hull bought a five-ton block of gypsum at a quarry near Fort Dodge and sent it by rail to Chicago where a stonemason was hired to sculpt a proper giant. The monster was then aged with acid and shipped to the New York village of Cardiff where Hull had a relative—William Newell—who buried it on his farm.
A year later Newell employed some laborers on the pretext of digging a well. Very soon their picks struck a stony ten-foot corpse, and considering that they knew nothing of the plot their fright does not seem unreasonable.
Thousands of sightseers arrived, so many that the town of Syracuse put a horse-drawn omnibus in service to Newell’s farm. Among these visitors was Ralph Waldo Emerson who judged the slumbering colossus to be “undoubtedly ancient.” The curator of the New York State Museum called it “the most remarkable object yet brought to light in this country”—a comment that might be variously interpreted. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes also paid a visit. Dr. Holmes drilled a hole behind one ear in order to inspect the substance, which suggests that at the very least he was uncertain. Most people thought it was a fossilized antediluvian man.
Whether or not Reverend Turk made a pilgrimage to Newell’s farm, we don’t know; but it would be safe to assume that when he heard about this giant in the earth he fairly quivered with satisfaction. How vindicated he must have felt. How joyous. How proud. Maybe a little complacent. Even a bit pontifical. If only we knew what he said to the diabolic cigar manufacturer.
And when Hull at last decided to crucify the gullible pastor, how did Reverend Turk respond? Did he pray? Did he forgive? Did he foam at the mouth? Furthermore, one can’t help wondering if the experience taught him anything. Probably not. Fundamentalists are apt to be so fundamental.
More sophisticated, more enigmatic, and infinitely more knowledgeable than our cranky American atheist was the British sponsor of Piltdown Man—that veritable missing link with a human cranium and the jaw of an ape.
“Several years ago I was walking along a farm-road close to Piltdown Common, Fletching, when I noticed that the road had been mended with some peculiar brown flints not usual in the district. On enquiry I was astonished to learn that they were dug from a gravel-bed on the farm, and shortly afterwards I visited the place, where two labourers were at work. . . .”
So begins the account of Mr. Charles Dawson, a rotund Uckfield lawyer and amateur antiquarian who discovered the famous skull. He told his story in 1912 at a meeting of the London Geological Society, to which he had been invited by Dr. Arthur Smith-Woodward of the British Museum, and his remarks later were printed in the society’s journal. Several renowned scientists were present when Dawson spoke, and for many years a painting titled Discussing the Piltdown Man hung on the staircase of the society’s headquarters.
Dawson said that after coming upon fragments of a skullcap he got in touch with Smith-Woodward, who examined the bones and considered them so important that he joined the search. Together they turned up quite a lot. According to Dawson: “Besides the human remains, we found two small broken pieces of a molar tooth of a rather early Pliocene type of elephant, also a much-rolled cusp of a molar of Mastodon, portions of two teeth of Hippopotamus, and two molar teeth of a Pleistocene beaver.”
From an adjacent field they recovered bits of deer antler and the tooth of a Pleistocene horse. All the specimens, including those of Piltdown Man, were highly mineralized with iron oxide.
The Piltdown cranium did not quite fit the Piltdown jaw, which made a few scientists uneasy. Yet they had been excavated at the same level, and despite the apelike lower jaw the molars were flat, indicating that the jaw worked with an acceptably human rotary motion. Then too, it would be exceedingly strange if, side by side, a prehistoric man had left only his skullcap while a prehistoric ape left only its jaw. Therefore they must belong to the same beast.
So excited was Dr. Smith-Woodward that he built a little house near the gravel bed, and when visitors arrived he could talk about nothing else.
A few more specimens were picked up: small bones from the nasal bridge and some delicate turbinal bones which support the membrane inside the nasal cavity.