In any event, while Rudolf Virchow and his nineteenth-century colleagues were disparaging Fuhlrott’s caveman, a most outrageous book was published. Its author—a tall, bald, white-bearded gentleman—subsequently became known as the Shy Giant. He read so slowly, wrote so slowly, even thought so slowly, remarks biographer William Irvine, “that he always felt desperately behindhand, like a tortoise concentrating every energy on the next step, as he creeps in frantic haste toward impossible horizons. . . .”
This sounds exactly like a living Neanderthal, but of course it was Charles Darwin. And twenty-eight years earlier he almost did not get to sail on theBeagle because Captain Fitzroy, who believed one could pretty well judge a man by his features, mistrusted the shape of Darwin’s nose. He thought the young man looked indecisive. We can only guess what might have happened, or failed to happen, had Fitzroy himself been more decisive and stamped his foot and lifted the gangplank so Darwin could not slip aboard.
Then the Scopes trial, that little masterpiece of idiocy, might never have been staged.
Nor should we have had that immortal debate between Thomas Huxley, on behalf of Darwin, and Bishop Wilberforce, known unkindly as Soapy Sam, on behalf of God:
“It would be interesting to know,” said the bishop, “whether the ape in question was on your grandfather’s or your grandmother’s side.”
But it is not a sound idea to prick a man as intelligent as Huxley, who whispered, “The Lord hath delivered him into my hands.” And getting to his feet he answered aloud: “If you ask me whether I would rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet who employs those faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion, then I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.”
Whereupon, we are told, a lady in the audience fainted. And good Captain Fitzroy, trembling with honorable Christian rage, picked up a Bible and was just prevented from throwing it at Huxley. Fitzroy later was promoted to vice-admiral, which seems to be the natural course of events.
One is tempted to caricature Fitzroy. Still, whatever his faults, the man was not a simpleton. He came from a distinguished family, which perhaps proves nothing, but he had traveled around the world on the survey shipBeagle once before, and had been appointed a captain at the age of twenty-three. His surveys were accurate and highly valued, and he was a Fellow of the Royal Society. It is said, too, that after getting to know Darwin he changed his opinion. All the same, no matter how hard you try to look without prejudice upon Captain Fitzroy, it seems best to admit that this is an individual you cannot love.
However, the important thing is the debate, not the audience, and those traditional opponents Science and Religion once again entered the arena when Thomas Huxley challenged Soapy Sam.
It is the scientist, of course, armed with some impertinent fact, who attacks first—though the maneuver may be oblique or heavily veiled. Then the ecclesiastic must counterattack, for the very good reason that he perceives a threat to his office and to his life’s work. The status quo must be protected, the heretical march of knowledge obstructed, whether it be the development of anesthetics, the experiments of Galileo, or the deductions of infamous bulb-nosed naturalists.
Both attitudes are easy to understand. Science feels obligated to inquire, whereas the Church comes armed with infallible dogma.
Thus we have Dr. John Lightfoot, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridgeand Master of Saint Catherine’s, nailing down the particulars in Archbishop Ussher’s article of faith: “Heaven and earth, center and circumference were created all together and in the same instant, clouds full of water. This took place, and Man was created by the Trinity on the 23rd October, 4004 B.C. at 9 o’clock in the morning.”
Gilgamesh the Sumerian may have been eating ham and eggs at that hour, but never mind; what impresses us is Dr. Lightfoot’s stately assurance.
By contrast, old Darwin frets about each mistake he makes, telling us he is ready to weep with vexation, referring to himself as “the most miserable, bemuddled, stupid dog in all England.” He goes then, we are informed, and walks through the winter morning—this aloof old genius—walking by himself and meditating, so early that he startles foxes trotting to their lairs at dawn.
Accompanying these famous champions we now and again meet an individual who, like some overexcited spectator at a wrestling match, resolves to assert himself by clambering into the ring. Consider a certain Denis or Didier Henrion, a seventeenth-century French engineer, who measured various bones that probably came from a brontosaurus and then announced without qualification that our progenitor Adam stood 123 feet, 9 inches tall. Eve, he said, had been five feet shorter. M. Henrion did not calculate their weight, which is too bad, nor Eve’s other measurements, which must have been formidable; but what we would like to know most of all is why he positioned himself so awkwardly in the path of common sense.
Then we have the case of a respected historian named von Eckhart.
Early in the eighteenth century Professor Johannes Bartolomaus Beringer who taught natural history at the University of Würzburg, and who collected fossils, dug up hundreds of stones containing the imprint of fruits, flowers, spiders, turtles, snakes,
