Of Paleopolitics and Missing Links - The Fossil Chronicles - page 11

The Darts sailed for South Africa shortly before Christmas 1922 and
arrived in late January, just before Raymond's thirtieth birthday. The
Medical School at the University of the Witwatersrand (affection-
ately known, to this day, as Wits) fulfilled their worst expectations.
It had a general air of dereliction and lacked water taps, electric out-
lets, and gas and compressed air for laboratories. Dart's permanent
staff consisted of one person who worked in the basement mortuary.
The dissecting tables supported desiccated corpses draped in coarse
burlap coverings. “Our first inspection,” recalled Dart, “left my wife,
whom I had taken from her medicine studies at Cincinnati, in tears—a
woman's prerogative I rather envied at that moment. . . . It would be
useless to deny that I was unhappy in the first 18 months. The abysmal
lack of equipment and literature forced me to develop an interest in
other subjects, particularly anthropology for which Elliot Smith had
fired my enthusiasm.” 34
Dart felt as though he had been banished to a dismal place by his
mentor and by London's anatomical aristocracy. Elliot Smith, on the
other hand, was reveling “in his new role of king-maker,” after having
already sent Joseph Shellshear to be chair of anatomy in Hong Kong
and Davidson Black to China, where he would later discover the fossil
known as Peking Man . 35 Packing Dart off to South Africa was consistent
with this “missionary zeal.” 36 But Dart's ill feelings were not without
merit. Reflecting about writing a recommendation for Dart for the
South African post, Sir Arthur Keith later recalled, “I did so, I am now
free to confess, with a certain degree of trepidation. Of his knowledge,
his power of intellect, and of imagination there could be no question;
what rather frightened me was his flightiness, his scorn for accepted
opinion, the unorthodoxy of his outlook.” 37 Years later, Dart himself
seemed sympathetic to Keith's view when he wrote in reference to an
unorthodox publication on whale brains that he had authored in 1923,
“Such a person, I can see now in retrospect, was not only controversial,
but upsetting and potentially dangerous.” 38
Even if it appeared to Dart that the Piltdown committee had arrayed