26 THE EVERLASTING MAN
He often wields it with a fanaticism far in excess of any- thing 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 be- comes almost as dangerous as a dog with his bone. And the dog at least does not deduce a theory from it, prov- ing that mankind is going to the dogs—or that it came from them. ;
For instance, I have pointed out the difficulty of keep- ing a monkey and watching it evolve into a man. Ex- perimental evidence of such an evolution being impos- sible, the professor is not content to say (as most of us would be ready to say) that such an evolution is likely enough anyhow. He produces his little bone, or little collection of bones, and deduces the most marvellous things from it. 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 charac- ter. 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
