Just not cricket

摘要

When I am browsing the shelves of a second hand bookshop, I don't like to be rushed. All manner of gems may be correctly located under the right headings, but you will never know what might turn up in the wrong place until you have spent sufficient time carefully looking through every shelf. Over Christmas and New Year, on holiday in Shropshire, it wasn't until my third visit to one of the local bookshops that I found Peeps at Men of the Old Stone Age by James Baikie (1928, A&C Black, London) misfiled in the biography section. If I hadn't been so thorough, I would have missed a treat. Peeps at Men... has much to entertain anyone with an interest in the history of geology and anthropology, but it provided me with something more, an interpretation that I had been pursuing without success-a restoration of Piltdown Man playing with his cricket bat (Fig. 8).