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Sir: After reading "The Age of Man" [Aug. 29], I happened to pick up G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man and read his perceptive comment on another famous reconstruction by paleontologists —Pithecanthropus. Every word of it could be applied to Ramapithecus and the Yale investigators who have reconstructed him from "no more than partial jawbones and a few teeth."
Said G.K.: "Those bones are far too few and fragmentary and dubious to fill up the whole of the vast void that does in reason and in reality lie between man and his bestial ancestors, if they were his ancestors . . . 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 character. People talked of Pithecanthropus as of Pitt or Fox or Napoleon . . . 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 a moment that this was the portrait of a thighbone; or of a few teeth and a fragment of a cranium.
"Sometimes the professor with his bone becomes almost as dangerous as a dog with his bone. And the dog at least does not deduce a theory from it, proving that mankind is going to the dogs—or that it came from them."
PAUL G.JACKSON
Mayville, N.Y.
How to Make Friends and . . .
Sir: As deplorable as the kidnaping case of U.S. Ambassador Charles Burke Elbrick [Sept. 12] might seem, it does have a positive side.
With the exception of the moon landing, no recent event has had a more favorable impact on U.S.-South American public relations than the well-publicized actions and reactions of a poised and seasoned diplomat during and after his capture. Ambassador Elbrick's newly acquired title: "Respected amigo."
FRITZ FINGADO
Rio de Janeiro
Wheels Within Wheels
Sir: I view with alarm TIME'S account [Sept. 12] of our present wheeling-dealing man in the White House(s). It used to be comforting that Truman was satisfied to be poor; that Eisenhower achieved security through royalties; that Roosevelt and Kennedy possessed inherited wealth; and that even L.BJ. had Lady Bird. But will a President who has already gained so much from inflation, and who stands to gain so much more, feel impelled to fight it for the rest of us? Maybe "Nixon's surprise call for milder tax reform" isn't so surprising after all.
L. RORABACHER
Sylva, N.C.
On Further Analysis
Sir: Political Scientist Barber's long-distance analysis of President Nixon's personality and predictions of his behavior [Sept. 12] began to wobble my confidence in your Behavior section until it was later mentioned that he claims no professional credentials as a behavior expert. That much had to be obvious, of course.