The Man who Found the Missing Link Eugène Dubois and His Lifelong Quest to Prove Darwin Right

Eugene Dubois was born on January 28, 1858, an interesting between-time in science. It was some eighteen months after the first Neanderthal skeleton was found in Germany and a little more than a year before Charles Darwin published "The Origin of Species" in England. Believing that a powerful truth must lie in Darwin's deceptively simple ideas, Dubois -- a brilliant young Dutch physician and anatomist -- vowed to discover it. There is a link, he declared, a link as yet unknown, between apes and Man. Finding it would be the greatest scientific discovery ever, and the name Eugene Dubois would be remembered. The Dubois family motto, "Recte et fortiter," means straight and strong, and Dubois lived it to the letter. He willfully abandoned his home and promising career at the University of Amsterdam to drag his wife and baby daughter halfway around the world to search the Dutch East Indies (n…