Bones of Contention
The scientific lecture hall at Cambridge was magnificent. Oak paneling rose to the high, elaborately carved ceiling, and its black horsehair chairs set within the steeply curved gallery afforded the large, murmuring crowd a perfect view of the still-empty podium and exhibits below.
Father had secured the best seats for us near the bottom center, but he was, at the moment, deeply engaged in heated conversation with several of Oxford’s morphology lecturers.
The Fourth International Congress of Zoology was an enormous affair. Peppered around the chamber I recognized some of the preeminent scientific minds of the day—from not only Britain and America but the Continent as well. There were fellows of the Royal Geographical Society, nobles, professors, military men, and a smattering of clergy. There was Sir Francis Galton who believed in the existence of a natural elite in mankind; a physiologist of note, Professor Sayle; and Mr. MacColl, the editor of the
Athenæum.
It was a distinguished crowd indeed.
I peered around, curious to see who from Cambridge had come. The whole of the biology, zoology, geology, and chemistry departments were there, lecturers and students from the college of comparative anatomy. Most of my cohorts from the human dissection laboratory had come, and I had to smile noticing that Woodley (who was “studying to be a physician, not a fossil hunter”) and a rather smug-looking Mr. Cartwright had made an appearance.
A small crowd was gathered around the table set to one side of the podium upon which the precious Java man bones were displayed. “Bones of contention,” some called them, and the black-frock-coated men surrounding the specimens were, I could see by their posture and gesticulations, already in heated debate as to their worth.
Mr. Shaw, the laboratory servant who apparently possessed skills beyond those of the anatomy laboratory, was at the base of the center aisle fussing with the episcope, a recent innovation that allowed opaque materials, such as book pages, drawings, mineral specimens, and leaves, to be projected onto a screen behind the lecturer. Cambridge was very proud of its episcope, and hardly a serious discourse was held anymore without it being employed.
A fellow of Trinity College with a loud ringing voice called the meeting to order, and we all took our seats. Father sat down beside me looking a bit red in the face with his jaw set hard as it always was when he was angry. “Eugène is not going to have an easy time of it,” he whispered.
“Did you ever think otherwise?”
Father sighed. “Scientists are among the most pigheaded people alive. Wouldn’t you think it should be just the opposite?”
Now Harold Gardiner, dean of Trinity College, a man whose heavily veined florid face betrayed his love of drink, came to the fore. “Good afternoon. I’ll not waste any precious time with a long introduction. We all know our esteemed speaker. He was recently awarded the Prix Broca for outstanding achievement in anthropology, Professor Eugène Dubois.”
Tall and fair-haired, with a handsome face and open, rather hopeful expression, Father’s old friend strode into the room, taking his place at the podium to what could generously be called polite applause. He squared his broad shoulders, looking for all the world like a man hard-pressed to allow anyone to undermine his most dearly held convictions. I’d heard my father say that Eugène’s assertions about
Pithecanthropus erectus,
which he called
P.e.
for short, were something akin to a holy crusade, and from the fire in his eyes I knew this to be the whole truth.
“I am here to present my riverside findings at the Trinel site in Java, the Dutch East Indies.”
The lights in the lecture hall dimmed, and with the episcope whirring, a schematic section of the geologic formations at Trinel was projected on the screen behind and above the podium, highlighting the all-important layers in which the
P.e.
fossils had been found. Almost immediately there were loud, skeptical mutterings from the audience.
Someone just behind Father and me wasted no time in calling out loudly, “Our esteemed colleague, Rudolph Virchow, is no longer with us…”
“I’m glad that old fossil is dead,” Father whispered a bit too loudly, referring to the recently deceased pasha of German science.
“… but if he were here, I’m sure he would strenuously object, as he had many times before, to your contention that the three bone fragments in question were part of the same individual. The skull is most certainly that of a giant gibbon of some kind, and the femur is clearly human. You yourself have pointed out the grievous injury to the thighbone. That injured man—”
“Pardon,” Dubois interrupted, “
P.e.
was a female.”
“The injured female,” the skeptic continued, sounding quite annoyed, “lived long enough for the bone to ossify. Apes do not perform those kinds of caretaking of their own species, as humans do.”
Dubois moved to the table and, picking up the skull in one hand, the femur in the other, demonstrated that they were extremely weighty. “These are thoroughly fossilized—stone—and the color of the two specimens is identical. Numerous geologists have confirmed the level at which they were found—and they
were
found at the same level, Dr. Ellenbogen.”
Near the front at the side aisle of the hall, a strapping fellow in a tan linen shooting jacket with padded shoulders that looked to be quite unnecessary stood up and called out, “Correct me if I’m wrong, Professor Dubois, but wasn’t a great deal of flora and fauna extracted from this same level at Trinel, fossils that confirm that their geologic histories are identical with
P.e.
’s?”
I noted that the outspoken man was clean-shaven except for a small pale mustache and looked altogether out of place in the room full of black-clad academics.
Indeed, every eye in the room fell on the man—clearly an American—defending the beleaguered speaker. He seemed to my eye “rakish,” if I’d had to describe him, and he’d made his declarations in bold, deliberate tones, evincing admiration from a few, irritation from the greatest majority of others.
“To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?” Dubois inquired.
“The name is Conrath. Ral Conrath. I’m an expedition leader and engineer by trade, and I’ve worked on every continent in the world. I had the great fortune to visit the Trinel site, though sadly after you’d left. Your team’s efforts there were unimpeachable.”
“Thank you.” Dubois, while certainly pleased at the kind words, was eager to get on with it and turned back to the subject at hand. “So I stand on my assertion that the skull, the femur, and the tooth, as well as the
entire collection
met their end in either the late Pliocene or early Pleistocene epoch.”
“Here the fantasy passes beyond all experience!” called out another heckler in the first row.
Father could no longer contain himself. He stood and faced the rotund and bespectacled clergyman who, from the fine cut of his robes and scarlet sash, could be identified as a cardinal. “Can’t you even devise your own ignorant insult? That was Rudolph Virchow’s boneheaded rejection of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, for crying out loud! How can you take seriously anything that idiot said?”
Arguments broke out all over the chamber now, and Dubois allowed them to swirl around him with admirable equanimity. But out the corner of my eye I caught a small, swift movement. Father’s hand had darted quickly to his chest. I glanced at his face and saw pain there, brief though it was, before he let the hand drop to his side and took his seat again. This alarmed me, but there was little to be done at the moment, and with order restored, another image was projected onto the screen, this a drawing of the inside of
P.e.
’s skullcap.
“With a foot-driven, diamond-tipped dentist’s drill, I was able to remove every bit of matrix from the inner skull,” Dubois went on, unable to conceal his pride. “I discovered the
Pithecanthropus erectus
’s cranial capacity to be one thousand ccs.”
There was a general murmuring of approval from the assembled. This was an undeniable fact, even to the disbelievers. Every paleoanthropologist and zoologist in the chamber knew very well that the largest anthropoid ape skull held no more than eight hundred ccs.
“A damn dental drill,” Father muttered. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“While Neanderthal skulls hold two hundred ccs more than
P.e.
’s, they share the same elongated cranial shape and strong brow ridges,” Dubois added. He moved behind the podium and signaled to Mr. Shaw for the next image. It showed a photographic cast of what I assumed was
P.e.
’s brain. Eugène must have poured plaster into the meticulously cleaned brain cavity. The foramen magnum, the bony hole through which the spinal cord exited the skull, was clearly visible.
Dubois pointed at the projected photograph. “Can you see how far forward the foramen magnum is on my specimen? This position is typical of animals with upright postures. This affords me, or should I say my beautiful
P.e.,
anatomical consistency between the skullcap and the femur—one more piece of evidence proving they came from the same animal.
“I’d say you’ve proved that beyond a reasonable doubt,” called out Ral Conrath.
“Hear, hear!” Archie cried.
“I have therefore come to the inescapable conclusion that
Pithecanthropus erectus
is neither ape nor human. She is a transitional creature between two species—Charles Darwin’s missing link in human evolution!”
Now there was general outrage in the hall, a roar that drowned out Dubois, who was attempting to continue.
“Isn’t there anything you can do, Father? I know he was expecting resistance, but this is appalling behavior.”
Archie had begun to rise from his chair when he noticed that a dapper older gentleman was already halfway to the podium, and that Eugène Dubois’s face had lit into a broad smile. Silver haired and silver bearded, the stranger was quite handsome and strode with the strength and vigor of a much younger man. Eugène Dubois put out his arms to welcome the distinguished interloper, and they shook all four hands before Dubois stepped aside and let him take the stage.
“Who is that?” I whispered to Father.
“That, my dear, is Professor Ernst Haeckel.”
I was speechless. I knew the zoologist and professor of comparative anatomy at Germany’s University of Jena to be one of the world’s foremost authorities on evolution and the author of one of my most prized volumes,
The History of Creation.
His early drawings of embryos had been singled out for praise by Darwin himself in his
Descent of Man.
More to the point on this day was Haeckel’s very presence, as he had been the greatest personal influence on Eugène Dubois’s career. Haeckel’s theories on “ape-like men” and “man-like apes” had been the cornerstone of Dubois’s quest. His suggestion that evidence of human evolution—“the missing link”—was to be found in the Dutch East Indies directly led Dubois to explore Java.
So nonplussed was I that my brain cleared only when Haeckel was partway through his summary of the evidence for human evolution of all life on earth. I was stunned. It was not simply that Ernst Haeckel’s arguments were clear and brilliant. But the man—bless his great heart—was publicly defending Dubois and denigrating Rudolph Virchow!
“I believe that fossil remains of a form intermediate between ape and man do exist, and that the
Pithecanthropus erectus
of her able discoverer, Eugène Dubois, is in fact a relic of the extinct group—intermediate between man and ape, to which as long ago as 1886 I gave the name
Pithecanthropus.
This is the long-lost ‘missing link’ in the chain of the highest primates, an intermediate form connecting the lower races of mankind to anthropoid apes!”
Now the murmuring in the room was more polite, for no one dared to disrespect Ernst Haeckel.
“The Neanderthal skulls of Spy and Moulin Quignon were declared by the sagacious Rudolph Virchow to be nothing more than ‘pathological specimens,’ produced only through disease and not, in fact, an early race of mankind. Virchow denies even Neanderthal man!”
Father reached over and gave my hand a happy squeeze. Things were going much better than he’d ever expected.
“It must be remembered, gentlemen and ladies,” Haeckel went on, “that for more than thirty years, Virchow regarded it as his special duty as a scientist to
oppose
the Darwinian theory and the doctrine of evolution. The ‘descent of man from the ape,’” he continued with real disgust creeping into his voice, “Virchow attacked with unmitigated zeal and unnatural energy. According to him, the ape-man is a mere ‘figment of a dream.’ I say here today that the petrified remains of
Pithecanthropus erectus
are the palpable contradiction of such an unfounded theoretical assumption!”
Unable to control myself, I began to applaud loudly. Father joined me, and though there was heard only a smattering of it in the gallery, from one corner it rang out unabashedly. Ral Conrath was on his feet, clapping enthusiastically. Finally the grudging scientists relented and gave Ernst Haeckel the ovation he deserved. Certainly it must have rankled many that by their applause they were, by association, applauding Eugène Dubois as well.
My eyes strayed to the strange Mr. Conrath, and I found to my embarrassment that he had been regarding
me
quite openly. Just then feeling happy and rather bold, I smiled back at him. He touched his fingers to his hatless head in a return salutation.
Something quivered inside me, somewhere below my belly, and I quickly turned away, glad for an excuse to avert my eyes.
Ernst Haeckel had begun speaking again.
* * *
It occurred to me that the food on my plate and that of my dinner companions lay almost altogether untouched. No one was the slightest bit interested in eating.
Talk was the thing.
Father and I, Dubois, and Ernst Haeckel, the latter a guest at the De Vere University Arms Hotel, were dining in its elegant restaurant. The Zoological Congress behind us, the ideas and debate it had engendered had set the air all around afire with controversy, raised voices, and laughter.