Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
the immediate reaction
At first blush, the response seemed okay. Three days after the
Star'
s
scoop, Sir Arthur Keith (from the Piltdown committee) was quoted offer-
ing high (and, as it turned out, prophetic) praise: “Professor Dart deserves
great credit. . . . He has certainly lived up to the opinion we formed of
him here. . . . Dart's discovery [is] so important . . . I hardly hoped it
would be made. Now I feel South Africa will produce other valuable
cables arrived from all over the world, and one of the earliest ones was
from Elliot Smith, who conveyed congratulations from himself and his
staff at University College, London. To Dart's delight, Elliot Smith also
informed the
Illustrated London News
that it was a “happy circumstance”
that the Taung fossil had fallen into Dart's hands, “because he is one of,
at the most, three or four men in the world who have had experience of
investigating such material and appreciating its meaning.”
46
It must have been pleasantly dizzying for Dart to bask in positive
responses from South African dignitaries, officials of the University of
Witwatersrand (which he had just made world-famous), and internation-
ally renowned scientists, such as Aleš Hrdlička, from the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington, D.C. Flattering newspaper editorials were
written about him and his discovery, and, ironically (for reasons that I
will reveal later), he received multiple offers of book contracts. One of
the letters that meant the most to Dart was from General Jan Christiaan
Smuts, who had recently completed his first term as prime minister of
I wish personally as President of the South African Association for the Ad-
vancement of Science to send you my warm congratulations on your impor-
tant discovery of the Taungs fossil. Your great keenness and zealous interest
in anthropology have led to what may well prove an epoch-making discov-
ery, not only of far-reaching importance from an anthropological point of
view, but also calculated to concentrate attention on South Africa as the great
field for scientific discovery which it undoubtedly is. . . . I congratulate you on
