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pigeons had always been. Then, turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey?'
This was the fatal mistake of his speech. Huxley instantly grasped the tactical advantage which the descent to personalities gave him. He turned to Sir Benjamin Brodie, who was sitting beside him, and emphatically striking his hand upon his knee, exclaimed, 'The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands.'2 The bearing of the exclamation did not dawn upon Sir Benjamin until after Huxley had completed his 'forcible and eloquent' answer to the scientific part of the Bishop's argument, and proceeded to make his famous retort.
On this (continues the writer in Macmillan's Magazine) Mr. Huxley slowly and deliberately arose. A slight tall figure, stern and pale, very quiet and very grave, he stood before us and spoke those tremendous words? words which no one seems sure of now, nor, I think, could remember just after they were spoken, for their meaning took away our breath, though it left us in no doubt as to what it was. He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth. No one doubted his meaning, and the effect was tremendous. One lady fainted and had to be carried out; I, for one, jumped out of my seat.
The fullest and probably most accurate account of these concluding words is the following, from a letter of the late John Richard Green, then an undergraduate, to his friend, afterwards Professor Royd Dawkins:3
I asserted?and I repeat?that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man?a man of restless and versatile intellect?who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.
The result of this encounter, though a check to the other side, cannot, of course, be represented as an immediate and complete triumph for evolutionary doctrine. This was precluded by the character and temper of the audience, most of whom were less capable of being convinced by the arguments than shocked by the boldness of the retort, although, being gentlefolk, as Professor Farrar remarks, they were disposed to admit on reflection that the Bishop had erred on the score of taste and good manners. Nevertheless, it was a noticeable feature of the occasion, Sir M. Foster4 tells me, that when Huxley rose he was received coldly, just a cheer of encouragement from his friends, the audience as a whole not joining in it. But as he made his points the applause grew and widened, until, when he sat down, the cheering was not very much less than that given to the Bishop. To that extent he carried an unwilling audience with him by the force of his speech. The debate on the ape question, however, was continued elsewhere during the next two years, and the evidence was com
2. Cf. 2 Samuel 5.19 (where the Lord promises to British historian. deliver the Philistines into David's hands). 4. Sir Michael Foster (1836-1907), British phys3. William Boyd Dawkins (1838-1929), British iologist and educator. geologist and archaeologist. Green (1837?1883),
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pleted by the unanswerable demonstrations of Sir W. H. Flower5 at the Cambridge meeting of the Association in 1862.
The importance of the Oxford meeting lay in the open resistance that was made to authority, at a moment when even a drawn battle was hardly less effectual than acknowledged victory. Instead of being crushed under ridicule, the new theories secured a hearing, all the wider, indeed, for the startling nature of their defense.
1901
5. Sir William Henry Flower (1831-1899), British zoologist. SIR EDMUND GOSSE
Philip Henry Gosse (1810?1888) was a zoologist of some repute and also an ardent adherent of a strict Protestant sect, the Plymouth Brethren. In an attempt to reconcile his scientific knowledge with his fundamentalist religious position, Gosse published in 1857 a work called Omphalos, the Greek word for 'navel.' The term is of central significance in the book's primary assertion that the earth carries the marks of a past that did not actually happen: just as Adam and Eve were created with navels even though they had not been born to a mother, Gosse argues, so had God created the world with what appear to be millions of years' worth of accumulated rock strata. The book pleased no one. Gosse's agonized experience is described by his son, the literary critic Sir Edmund Gosse (1849?1928), in an autobiography published in 1907. This selection is from chapter 5.
From Father and Son
So, through my Father's brain, in that year of scientific crisis, 1857, there rushed two kinds of thought, each absorbing, each convincing, yet totally irreconcilable. There is a peculiar agony in the paradox that truth has two forms, each of them indisputable, yet each antagonistic to the other. It was this discovery, that there were two theories of physical life, each of which was true, but the truth of each incompatible with the truth of the other, which shook the spirit of my Father with perturbation. It was not, really, a paradox, it was a fallacy, if he could only have known it, but he allowed the turbid volume of superstition to drown the delicate stream of reason. He took one step in the service of truth, and then he drew back in an agony, and accepted the servitude of error.
This was the great moment in the history of thought when the theory of the mutability of species was preparing to throw a flood of light upon all departments of human speculation and action. It was becoming necessary to stand emphatically in one army or the other. Lyell1 was surrounding himself with disciples, who were making strides in the direction of discovery. Darwin had long been collecting facts with regard to the variation of animals and plants.
1. Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875), British geologist.
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Hooker and Wallace, Asa Gray and even Agassiz,2 each in his own sphere, were coming closer and closer to a perception of that secret which was first to reveal itself clearly to the patient and humble genius of Darwin. In the year before, in 1856, Darwin, under pressure from Lyell, had begun that modest statement of the new revelation, that 'abstract of an essay,' which developed so mightily into The Origin of Species. Wollaston's Variation of Species3 had just appeared, and had been a nine days' wonder in the wilderness.
On the other side, the reactionaries, although never dreaming of the fate which hung over them, had not
