Abstract Arthur Smith Woodward’s wife, Maud, recorded scientific visitors invited to their home between 1894 and 1944, on an embroidered tablecloth. The tablecloth contains 342 signatures covering a 50-year period. It forms a unique and fascinating historical record including many of the great figures of late nineteenth and early twentieth century biology, geology and palaeontology from around the world. Many other professionals, amateurs and collectors are also represented.

Abstract In 1884, Arthur Smith Woodward first met Charles Dawson, a solicitor and industrious amateur collector, antiquarian, geologist, archaeologist and palaeontologist. This began a long association and friendship centred on their mutual interest in palaeontology and human evolution. Dawson devised a complicated plot focused around the ancient river gravel deposits at Barkham Manor near the village of Piltdown, Sussex. In these gravels he planted stone tools and fossil mammal remains together with the lower jaw of an ape and numerous modern human cranial bones to deceive the scientific establishment into believing an early human ancestor had been found in his own back yard. Cleverly devised to provide anatomists and archaeologists with evidence for concepts that they wanted to believe were true, Dawson fuelled numerous contentious debates among scientists that quickly attracted international attention. Nothing could be more unfortunate than such a respectable scientist as Arthur Smith Woodward being taken in by the events of 1912, and then subsequently swept along by them well into his retirement right up to the time of his death in 1944.

Abstract In the 50 years which have elapsed since 1888 an increasingly active interest features the search for Man’s antecedents. The borderline field of prehistoric archeology encompasses both paleontology and archeology and, as the approach is made by the paleontologist, concerns itself more particularly with the sequence of faunas of the Quaternary and determination of first appearance of a human record in this sequence. Investigations conducted over this period of time seem to have emphasized the divergence in history of the New and Old World with regard to Man’s time and place of development, and to have established more clearly and on a surer factual basis Man’s position in the Quaternary sequence of America. The state of this knowledge in our own region is one, however, in which active interest is now thoroughly aroused with the result that accumulation of new facts is still in progress, and clarification of debatable issues a matter of the future.