64 PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 



grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed 

 descent from a ' venerable ape/ Huxley took the 

 opportunity offered. Of the various versions of his 

 retort it is perhaps most appropriate for us to quote 

 that recalled by a late General Secretary of the 

 Association, Dr. A. G. Vernon Harcourt, and furnished 

 to the biographer of Hooker and Huxley : ' If I am 

 asked whether I would choose to be descended from 

 the poor animal of low intelligence and stooping gait, 

 who grins and chatters as we pass, or from a man, 

 endowed with great ability and a splendid position, 

 who should use these gifts to discredit and crush 

 humble seekers after truth, I hesitate what answer 

 to make/ Hooker followed up this castigation of 

 the bishop, and as he wrote to Darwin, ' hit him 

 in the wind at the first shot in ten words taken 

 from his own ugly mouth/ We are free to con- 

 jecture as to the validity of the narrative in the 

 biography of the bishop himself, 1 which thus records 

 the episode : ' The bishop . . . made a long and 

 eloquent speech condemning Mr. Darwin's theory 

 as unphilosophical and as founded on fancy. ... In 

 the course of this speech, which made a great im- 

 pression, the bishop said that whatever certain 

 people might believe, he would not look at the 

 monkeys in the Zoological Gardens as connected with 

 his ancestors, a remark that drew from a certain 

 learned professor the retort, "I would rather be 

 descended from an ape than a bishop. " ' It is difficult 

 to feel that this latter version, as an historical record, 

 is any more justifiable than the bishop's own lapse 

 from the amenities of debate. 



1 Life of the Rt. Eev. Samuel Wilberforce, D.D., by R. G. Wilber- 

 force (1881). 



