FESTSCHRIFT PRESENTED TO PROFESSOR RAYMOND DART BY HIS APPRECIATIVE PAST AND PRESENT STUDENTS - ONE OF 100 COPIES SIGNED BY DART

This Festschrift originally appeared in the University of the Witwatersrand Medical School's journal, The Leech (Volume XXVIII, Numbers 3, 4 and 5, November 1958, the Raymond A. Dart Commemorative Number). This is one of a specially bound edition limited to 100 copies probably the only separately issued edition) - This is No.13, and it is boldly signed and dated (9 January 1959) by Professor Dart. From the library of Ron (Rueben) Plotkin, one of the "Special Editors", signed by him and dated Johannesburg, 1959, on the front free endpaper. With contributions (amongst others) by distinguished anthropologists P.V. Tobias and L.S.B. Leakey. 63pp.

In the original maroon limp leather binding with gilt lettering and crest of the University of the Witwatersrand Medical School on the front cover. Slight rubbing of the corners and edges but a very good plus copy.

Queensland-born Raymond Arthur Dart (1893-1988), anatomist and anthropologist, achieved lasting fame soon after his appointment in January 1923 as professor of anatomy, University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg. In November 1924 Dart was handed a fossil skull that had recently been discovered at Taungs (later Taung), 100 miles . . . north of Kimberley. He extracted the fossil from the hard matrix and found that the skull was that of a child possessing a mixture of apish and human features. The child had held its head on a nearly vertical spinal column its teeth, especially its little canines, were human-like. Although the brain was small, like that of an ape, its form seemed to be hominoid. Thinking that its blend of traits might characterise the supposed missing link between humans and non-human animals on the old notion of a chain of being, Dart named the species "Australopithecus africanus" and published his findings in "Nature" in February 1925.