A LAWYER’S FAD.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXXV, Issue 3802, 12 April 1913, Page 10

A LAWYER’S FAD.

THAT HAS ENRICHED SCIENCE

Charles Dawson, a lawyer, of Lewes, in Sussex, England, is receiving congratulations from scientists all over tho world as a result of liis fad for poking about ruins and digging in likely spots for remains of past civilisations.

It is owing to Lawyer Dawson’s fad that the skeleton of a woman was recently found who lived in Sussex 200,000 years ago, who could not cook, or talk or wash or light a fire, who was as familiar with the giant lizard of prehistoric times as her descendant to-day is with her pet Pekingese.

Mr Dawson’s flame does not entirely rest on the new woman. He has delved into many byways of history, ancient and modern. Among his other discoveries are;

The footprints of the magalosarus. The natural gas as. Heathfield, Sussex.

Ho is also celebrated as the chronicles of many wholly or half-forgotten incidents of the Norman Conquest. All, indeed, that Sussex soil and antiquities can reveal of the doings of our ancestors comes alike as fish to Mr. Dawson’s- net. Like Stephenson, whose clay engines were the progenitors of our modern expresses, Mr. Dawson has watched a boyish hobby grow until now his work, began in odd half-holidays from school, is recognised and vAlued by the greatest scientists of Europe. The ordinary field-club schoolboy deals in white hats and newts. Mr. Dawson, when ho was a boy, discovered no fewer than three new species oi’ iguanodons, one of which is named after him.

Not all his prehistoric pets, however, were reptiles. There were great brightscaled fishs a yard in length ; tiny mammal teeth, the earliest found in Europe in tho Secondary rocks, and delicate fossil ferns and shells—nearly all of them new to science. His first step toward the discovery of fossil man took place in 1882, w hen a short holiday was spent in digging beneath the floors of stalagmite, in the Derbyshire caves for remains of our earlv ancestors.

Two years later came the great wrench. The collection had grown too large for any private house, and professional work demanded that Mr Dawson should go to London. Tho British Museum was only too glad to have his specimens, in return for their actual cost, made tip of the tiny sums paid to quarry men and others, and agreed to group them under t'hc name of the. Dawson Collection.