I20 Thomas Henry Huxley 



people it seemed to be a choice between a world with 

 God and a woild without God ; and the accredited de- 

 fenders of religion gathered every force of argument, 

 of misrepresentation, conscious and unconscious, of re- 

 spectability, and of prejudice to crush once forgh the 

 \ obnoxious doctrine and its obnoxious supportersj In 

 the autumn of that year ;,t fell that the meeting of the 

 \ British Association, then coming into prominence as 

 the annual parliament of the sciences, was to be held 

 at Oxford. It was inevitable that evolution should be 

 debated formall}^ and informally in the sessions of the 

 Association, and it must have seemed to the orthodox 

 that there, in that beautiful city, its air vibrant with 

 tinkling calls to faith, its halls and libraries crowded 

 with the devout and the learned, its history and tradi- 

 tions alike calling on all to defend the old fair piety, in 

 such an uncongenial air, /the supporters of evolution 

 must be overwhelmecL Almost the whole w^eight ot" 

 t he attack had to be resisted by Huxley. In the vari- 

 ous sectional meetmgs he had combat after combat with 

 professors and clerics. Of these dialectic fights the 

 most notable were one with Owen on the anatomical 

 structure of the brain, and another with Wilberforce 

 upon the general question of evolution. Owen con- 

 tended that there were anatomical differences not 

 merely of degree but of kind between the brain of man 

 and the brain of the highest ape, and his remarks were 

 accepted by the audience as a complete and authorita- 

 tive blow to the theory of descent. Huxley at once met 

 Owen with a direct and flat contradiction, and pledged 

 his reputation to justifj' his contradiction with all 

 due detail on a further occasion. As a matter of fact, 

 he did justify the contradiction, and no anatomist would 

 now dream of attempting the support of the proposition 



