MICHIGAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 86 



Advancement of Science was to meet at Oxford in I860, and it had been 

 given out that the Bishop of Oxford had determined to "smash" Darwin. 

 The meeting place in the medieval university building was in consequence 

 crowded to suffocation with even the window ledges occupied by uni- 

 versity dons keen for the excitement of the contest. By a mere accident 

 and at the last urgent request of his friends Huxley reluctantly agreed 

 to be present, for he rightly believed that an appeal would be made to 

 the emotions and to prejudice, and he feared no good could come from 

 the scientific argument. It was the tremendous success which he here 

 achieved that fully decided him to take up the cudgels for Darwin, and 

 at the sacrifice of being branded as a heretic during much of his life- 

 time, he was destined to go down to posterity not only as the magnificent 

 protagonist of the doctrine of evolution, but as the redoubtable champion 

 of freedom of thought within the whole realm of science. 



Of the encounter at the Oxford meeting there are a number of con- 

 temporary accounts, one of which says of the Bishop's address : 



In a light, scoiRng tone, florid and fluent, he assured us that there was nothing 

 in the idea of evolution, rock pigeons were what rock pigeons had always l)een. 

 Then turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was 

 it througli his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a 

 nionkej. 



Huxley was sitting beside the venerable Sir Benjamin Brodie, and at 

 this descent to personalities he struck his hand upon his knee and turning 

 to his neighbor exclaimed, "The Lord hath delivered him into mine 

 hands." Without at all comprehending, Sir Benjamin stared vacantly 

 and the meaning of Huxley's words did not daAvn upon him until Huxley 

 had arrived at his famous retort. When the storm of applause whicli 

 followed tlic Bishop's address had subsided the president called upon 

 Huxley to reply. 



On this 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 tre- 

 mendous 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 breatii, 

 though it left us in no doubt as to what it was. 



There was first a calm scientific discussion of Darwin's theory after 

 which Huxley turned to the Bishop to say : 



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 a success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into 

 scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to oliscure them 

 l)y 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. 



