138 THE COMING [OH. 



thrown on the origin of man and his history* yet 

 friends and foes alike at once drew what was the 

 necessary corollary from the theory. It is as amus- 

 ing, as it is surprising at the present day, to recall 

 the storm of prejudice which was excited. At the 

 British Association Meeting at Oxford in 1860, after 

 an American professor had indignantly asked the 

 question, ' Are we a fortuitous concourse of atoms ? ' 

 as a comment on Darwin's views, Dr Samuel Wilber- 

 force, the Bishop of Oxford, ended a clever but 

 flippant attack on the Origin by enquiring of Huxley, 

 who was present as Darwin's champion, if it 'was 

 through his grandfather or his grandmother that he 

 claimed his descent from a monkey?' 



Huxley made the famous and well-deserved re- 

 tort: 



'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 ashamed in recalling, it would rather 

 be a man a man of restless and versatile intellect who not 

 content with 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 138 . 3 



The violent attack on Darwin's views by the 

 once-famous Bishop of Oxford was outdone, a few 

 years later, by an even more absurd outburst on the 



