ch. xiii.] REVIEWS AND CRITICISMS, 18G0. 253 



the chair, the meeting broke up, leaving the impression that 

 those most capable of estimating the arguments of Darwin 

 in detail saw their way to accept his conclusions." 



Many versions of Mr. Huxley's speech were current : the 

 following report of his conclusion is from a letter addressed 

 by the late John Richard Green, then an undergraduate, to 

 a fellow-student, now Professor Boyd Dawkins : " I assert- 

 ed, 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 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 acquaint- 

 ance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and dis- 

 tract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue 

 by eloquent digressions, and skilled appeals to religious pre- 

 judice." * 



The following letter shows that Mr. Huxley's presence at 

 this remarkable scene depended on so slight a chance as that 

 of meeting a friend in the street ; that this friend should 

 have been Robert Chambers, so that the author of the 

 Vestiges should have sounded the war-note for the battle of 

 the Origin, adds interest to the incident. I have to thank 

 Mr. Huxley for allowing the story to be told in words of his 

 not written for publication. 



T. H. Huxley to Francis Darwin. 



June 27, 1861. 



... I should say that Fremantle's account is substan- 

 tially correct ; but that Green has the passage of my speech 

 more accurately. However, I am certain that I did not use 

 the word " equivocal." f 



The odd part of the business is that I should not have 

 been present except for Robert Chambers. I had heard of 

 the Bishop's intention to utilise the occasion. I knew he 

 had the reputation of being a first-rate controversialist, and 

 I was quite aware that if he played his cards properly, we 

 should have little chance, with such an audience, of making 

 an efficient defence. Moreover, I was very tired, and wanted 



* Mr. Fawcett wrote {Macmillaii's. Magazine, 1860) : 

 " The retort was so justly deserved and so inimitable in its manner, that 

 no one who was present can ever forget the impression that it made." 

 t This agrees with Professor Victor Carus's recollection. 



