REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY. 7] 5 



l.linded the bishop to the tactical bUinder in thus coarsely invithu-- -i 

 retort Huxley was instantly upon his feet with a speech demolishhiff 

 the bishop s card house of mistakes; and at the close he observed th-it 

 since a question of personal preferences had been very improperly 

 brought into the discussion of a scientiiic theory he felt free to con- 

 fess that if the alternatives were descent, on the one hand from a 

 respectable monkey, or on the other from a bishop of the Enolish 

 Church who could stoop to such misrepresentations and sophisins as 

 the audience had lately listened to, he should declare in favor of the 

 monkey. 



Now this was surely not what Huxley said, nor how he said it. His 

 own account is that, at Soapy Sam's insolent taunt, he simply whis- 

 pered to his neighbor. Sir Benjamin Brodie, " The Lord hath delivci-ed 

 him into my hands," a remark which that excellent old gentleman 

 received with a stolid stare. Huxley sat quiet until the chairman 

 called him up. His concluding retort seems to have been most cai-e- 

 fully reported by John Richaid Green, then a student at Oxfoid, in a 

 letter to his friend, BoA^d Dawkins: ''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 i-ecalling. 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 ac(iuaint- 

 ance, 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." This can 

 hardly be accurate; no electric eft'ect could have been wrought by so 

 long-winded a sentiment. I agree with a writer in Macmillan's Maga- 

 zine that this version is " much too Green," but it doubtless gives the 

 purport of what Huxley probably said in half as many hut far more 

 picturesque and fitting words. I have a feeling that the electric efi'ect 

 is best preserved in the Youmans version, in spite of its manifest ver- 

 bal inaccuracy. It is curious to read that in the ensuing buzz of 

 excitement a iady fainted and had to be carried from the room: hut 

 the audience were in general quite alive to the bishop's blunder in 

 manners and tactics, and, with the genuine English love of fair play, 

 they loudh' applauded Huxley. From that time forth it was recog- 

 nized that he was not the sort of man to be browbeaten. .\s for 

 Bishop Wilberforce, he carried with him from the afiray no bitter- 

 ness, but was always afterwards most courteous to his castigatoi-. 



When Huxlev had his scrimmage with Congreve, in 18Gi>, over the 

 scientific aspects of positivism, I was giving lectures to post-graduate 

 classes at Harvard on the positive philosophy. I never had any bkn.g 

 for Comte or his ideas, but entertained an absurd notion that the epi- 

 thet - positive" was a proper and convenient one to apply to scicntihc 



