The Earth He Loved
Its Place in the Life of Teilhard de Chardin
Independently Published, 2024
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"And then, amid the complexity and immobility of the rocks, there rise suddenly toward me ‘gusts of being,’ sudden and brief fits of awareness of the laborious unification of things, and it is no longer myself thinking, but the Earth acting. It is infinitely better."
The Earth He Loved tells the story of Teilhard de Chardin by following his path through forests, deserts, mountains, and caves, over oceans, under skies, even to a place where dragons came to die. (Humanity’s "missing link" was found there.) Walking it will awaken in you what it did in him: a sense of the planet as a whole, a sense of it evolving, a sense of Spirit rising from its core. The future of the earth lies in our hands, Teilhard writes. "How shall we decide?"
The book is illustrated with images from Teilhard: Visionary Scientist and a variety of Creative Commons sources. Links in the eBook take you to Teilhard’s books, open to the very page from which a quotation comes.
Introduction
1. Stones
2. Deserts
3. The Weald
4. Caves
5. Trenches
6. A Marvelous Place
7. Dragon Bone Hill
8. Mountains
9. Seas
10. Sky
From Chapter 7
Dragon Bone Hill
Nineteen-twenty-nine’s excavations came to an end on a cold and snowy December 2, almost seventy years to the day after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Working with a crew of four that day—hammers in one hand, candles in the other—a young Chinese scientist by the name of Pei Wenzhong came across a skull embedded in hard clay. He extracted it, wrapped it in soiled laundry to hide it from bandits, and took it back to Beijing.
Davidson Black spent many nights cleaning the fossil while, in another building, Teilhard studied the materials found with it, the better to date it. Several weeks later, the two sent a telegram to Marcellin Boule in Paris.
28 DEC 1929
NEW YEAR GREETINGS. RECOVERED CHOU-KOU-TIEN UNCRUSHED ADULT SINANTHROPUS SKULL. ENTIRE EXCEPT FACE. LETTER FOLLOWS.
The letter completed the picture.
Date Uncertain
To Marcellin Boule,
At Choukoutien the largest part of the cerebral cranium of a Sinanthropus has just been unearthed, undamaged . . . The jaws are missing. Still, in its present condition, the find is most exciting. The braincase is similar in proportions to that of Pithecanthropus, but with frontal and parietal protuberances distinct (somewhat as on the skullcap of Neanderthals). Supraorbital ridges and postorbital constriction are more strongly marked than in the Neanderthals.
Pithecanthropus, or "Java Man," was the name given to hominid remains found in Indonesia by Eugène Dubois in 1891. But those remains were far less complete and less well preserved than those of Sinanthropus. To many, Peking Man was the indisputable missing link, roughly half a million years old, between apes and humans. News of its discovery created headlines around the world.
As the one who brought the discovery to the French-speaking world, Teilhard was often credited with actually finding the fossil. "He was at pains to disclaim this distinction," wrote George Barbour, a colleague in geology.
Teilhard was also at pains to insist that more than luck was involved. "The discovery of Sinanthropus is not, as some people have believed, the result of a happy stroke of the pick," he wrote in Revue des Questions Scienti!ques. "It represents three years of systematic and devoted work."
And more:
7 February, 1930
To the Abbé Christophe Gaudefroy,
There comes this Sinanthropus skull, which I did not, of
course, discover myself, but which I was in the nick of time
to deal with from the geological and paleontological
angle.
Such coincidences "madly" increase my faith in the presence
of God in our lives. If I was offered whatever chair in
Paris tomorrow, I wonder whether I'd dare accept it as
long as I hadn't felt the end of the seam which is still
growing richer here for me every day.
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