Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
My dear Dart,
It might help you in the revision of your manuscript to know the sort of
criticisms which have been made by some of the referees and by myself. . . .
All these notes apply to the pages relating to the teeth, because in the case
of that part of the paper I did make a desperate effort to see whether I
could not secure its publication . . . but the same sort of criticisms have been
made of the rest of the paper. . . . The critics repeatedly referred to the fact,
which of course you are only too aware of yourself, that the anthropoid
material at your disposal was too small to justify adequate comparison
with the Taungs material. In this matter of course we can supply you with
additional comparative material. . . . I think it would also be wise to cut out
the purple patches in your general conclusions and simply restrict yourself
to the inferences which definitely emerge from your description and
comparison. State these inferences in carefully restrained language.
Yours sincerely, (signed) G. Elliot Smith
35
Several things are striking about the review that Dart's monograph
received from the Royal Society. First, he was so discouraged that he did
not even publish the paper about australopithecine teeth there. About
two years after receiving the above letter, Dart wrote to a colleague
in Japan, asking if he would like to publish a paper on the dentition of
Dart's paper on australopithecine teeth appeared in Japan rather than
have been an obstacle to publishing the whole monograph, since Elliot
Smith kindly offered to supply Dart with additional comparative mate-
rial to help him revise the dental section. Finally, “purple” prose was a
stylistic concern that could have been remedied with the help of an edi-
tor or copyeditor, as is frequently done in modern journals. Today, Dart's
manuscript remains unpublished in the University of Witwatersrand
Archives, having been rejected by the British scientific aristocracy. I first
set eyes on Dart's monograph while doing research for this topic in the
summer of 2008. Its contents, to put it mildly, were surprising. But more
on that in the next chapter.
