Biology Reference
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the human fore-brain. It was in simple language by this resplendent red-
gowned imposing graduate of our very own university and school.” 25
Impressed by Elliot Smith, Dart made a vow: “Neurology —how the
brain had come to be as we found it, could anything more be discov-
ered about it and its workings? This had long since become my main
life objective; and the dream-world already spontaneously fashioned
was to join Dr Grafton Elliot Smith after the war years were over and
to spend a lifetime alongside him finding out whatever one could, of
what one needed to know about the head and its brain.” 26 Dart's dream
became real after he graduated from medical school in 1917 and served
overseas in the Australian Army Medical Corps. Elliot Smith, who had
moved to University College, London, was expanding the Department
of Anatomy there and “shocked” Dart by appointing him to be his first
senior demonstrator.
In 1919, University College was coming into its heyday. With gen-
erous support from the Rockefeller Foundation in the United States,
new buildings were erected to enhance the medical sciences, and other
facilities were enlarged. Elliot Smith was training a generation of young
anatomists who eventually assumed key positions in far-off places such
as Hong Kong and Beijing (then Peking). By 1922, he was also incremen-
tally increasing the staff of the Department of Anatomy, where Dart
had become a lecturer in histology and embryology. The comparative
anatomical, osteological, and fossil collections in London were superb,
as were the libraries. Dart recalled that 1922 was his happiest year at
University College, because he had found an exciting new interest in
anthropology. In his free time, he examined the comparative brain col-
lection at the Royal College of Surgeons and was gradually drawn in
by Elliot Smith's efforts to make a new reconstruction of the Piltdown
skull. 27
In this exciting environment, Dart exercised his “unflinching forth-
rightness” by advocating, along with his colleague and close friend
Joseph Shellshear, heretical ideas about how nerve cells originate in
embryos. Although these two established something of a reputation for
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