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He found in Java a piece of
a skull, seeming by its contour to be smaller than the human. Somewhere
near it he found an upright thigh-bone and in the same scattered fashion
some teeth that were not human. If they all form part of one creature,
which is doubtful, our conception of the creature would be almost
equally doubtful. But the effect on popular science was to produce a
complete and even complex figure, finished down to the last details of
hair and habits. He was given a name as if he were an ordinary
historical character. People talked of Pithecanthropus as of Pitt or Fox
or Napoleon. Popular histories published portraits of him like the
portraits of Charles the First and George the Fourth. A detailed drawing
was reproduced, carefully shaded, to show that the very hairs of his
head were all numbered No uninformed person looking at its carefully
lined face and wistful eyes would imagine for a moment that this was the
portrait of a thigh-bone; or of a few teeth and a fragment of a cranium.
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>>2992489
We talk very truly of the patience of science; but in this department it
would be truer to talk of the impatience of science. Owing to the
difficulty above described, the theorist is in far too much of a hurry.
We have a series of hypotheses so hasty that they may well be called
fancies, and cannot in any case be further corrected by facts. The most
empirical anthropologist is here as limited as an antiquary. He can only
cling to a fragment of the past and has no way of increasing it for the
future He can only clutch his fragment of fact, almost as the primitive
man clutched his fragment of flint. And indeed he does deal with it in
much the same way and for much the same reason. It is his tool and his
only tool. It is his weapon and his only weapon. He often wields it with
a fanaticism far in excess of anything shown by men of science when they
can collect more facts from experience and even add new facts by
experiment. Sometimes the professor with his bone becomes almost as
dangerous as a dog with his bone. And the dog at least does not deduce a
theory from it, proving that mankind is going to the dogs–or that it
came from them.
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