Dragon Bone Hill, a site in the western hills outside Beijing, is so named because prehistoric fossils found there were thought to be the remains of dragons. Locals used to grind up the fossils and sell the powders for their imagined curative powers for everything from insomnia to impotence until the Chinese government banned the practice a few decades ago.
The clash between science and superstition is one important theme of Amir D. Aczel's biography of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, "The Jesuit and the Skull." A respected paleontologist, Teilhard was a member of the team of scientists who discovered the remains of Peking Man, a promising candidate for the "missing link" in human evolution, at Dragon Bone Hill in 1929. It was only one episode in an adventurous, tumultuous life that coincided with the wars and revolutions of the early 20th century.
Aczel, who has written on key figures in mathematics and science, is gifted at explaining complex concepts and introducing the men and women who first articulated them in fast-paced, story-driven accounts. For example, he makes good use of the mysterious disappearance of the Peking Man during the chaotic first days of World War II, an episode reminiscent of "The Da Vinci Code."
Then too, the Frenchman's life story is so deeply soaked in conflict and contradiction that it sometimes reads like an invented one. Tall, dapper, handsome and aristocratic, Teilhard was a charismatic figure who inevitably attracted the attention of the women around him. But as a Jesuit priest who had taken a vow of chastity, he refused to enter into the sexual union that some of them sought. And because his vows included one of obedience, his most important work, his philosophical writings -- an effort to embrace both a mystical faith in religion and the hard facts disclosed by scientific inquiry -- remained unpublished during his lifetime because the Roman Catholic Church decreed that they were heretical.
Teilhard's most vexing problems revolve around his membership in the Society of Jesus. His popularity and success in the secular world prompted his superiors to send this most cosmopolitan of men into exile in the wilds of Asia and Africa. And because he elected not to break his vow of chastity or withdraw from his order, the love he shared with a sculptress eventually withered and died.
