This weekend I had a chance to get through a few shorter anthropology books that I purchased a few weeks ago, including Our Face From Fish to Man, The Leopard's Spots, and Adventures With the Missing Link. The last book, by Raymond Dart, is part autobiography and part popular science book, and the reaction of the public to his famous "Taung child" described within is quite interesting. Some hailed the discovery, others criticized or marginalized it, but for a time it entered the public consciousness as a representation of something ugly and brutish, yet inextricably connected to ourselves. The periodical The Spectator ran a contest for the best epitaph for Australopithecus in six lines of verse or sixty words of prose. According to Dart, the series was led by this poem by Humbert Wolfe;
Here lies a man, who was an ape.
Nature, grown weary of his shape,
Conceived and carried out the plan
By which the ape is now the man.
The winning entry, however, was by G. Rostrevor Hamilton;
Speechless with half-human leer,
Lies a hidden monster here:
Yet here, read backwards, beauty lies,
And here the wisdom of the wise.
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