Oh. Xin.] REVIEWS AND CRITICISMS, 1860. 239 



little piece of matter no bigger than the end of this gold 

 pencil-case.' Lastly as to the descent from a monkey, he said : 

 ' I should feel it no shame to have risen from such an origin. 

 But I should feel it a shame to have sprung from one who 

 prostituted the gifts of culture and of eloquence to the service 

 of prejudice and of falsehood.' 



" Many others spoke. Mr. Gresley, an old Oxford don, pointed 

 out that in human nature at least orderly development was not 

 the necessary rule ; Homer was the greatest of poets, but he 

 lived 3000 years ago, and has not produced his like. 



" Admiral Fitz-Koy was present, and said that he had often ex- 

 postulated with his old comrade of the Beagle for entertaining 

 views which were contradictory to the First Chapter of Genesis. 



" Sir John Lubbock declared that many of the arguments 

 by which the permanence of species was supported came to 

 nothing, and instanced some wheat which was said to have 

 come off an Egyptian mummy and was sent to him to prove 

 that wheat had not changed since the time of the Pharaohs ; 

 but which proved to be made of French chocolate.* Sir 

 Joseph (then Dr.) Hooker spoke shortly, saying that he had 

 found the hypothesis of Natural Selection so helpful in explain- 

 ing the phenomena of his own subject of Botany, that he had 

 been constrained to accept it. After a few words from Darwin's 

 old friend Professor Henslow who occupied the chair, the 

 meeting broke up, leaving the impression that those most 

 capable of estimating the arguments of Darwin in detail saw 

 their way to accept his conclusions." 



Many versions of Mr. Huxley's speech were current : the 

 following report of his conclusion is from a letter addressed 

 by the late John Eichard Green, then an undergraduate, to 

 a fellow-student, now Professor Boyd 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 recalling, it would 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 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." j 



* Sir John Lubbock also insisted on the embryological evidence for 



evolution. — F. D. 



t Mr. Fawcett wrote (MacmillarCs Magazine, 1860) : — 



" The retort was so justly deserved and so inimitable in its manner, 



that no one who was present can ever forget the impression that it made." 



