iv MODERN EVOLUTION 199 



acrid. He finished his harangue by asking Huxley 

 whether he was related by his grandfather's or 

 grandmother's side to an ape. ' The Lord hath 

 delivered him into my hands,' whispered Huxley to 

 a friend at his side, as he rose to reply. After 

 setting his opponent an example in demonstrating 

 his case by evidence which, although refuting Owen, 

 evoked no admission of error from him then or ever 

 after, Huxley referred to the personal remark of 

 Wilberforce. And this is what he said : 



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. 



Perhaps the best comment on a piece of what is 

 now ancient history is to quote the admissions made 

 by Lord Salisbury a rigid High Churchman in 

 his Presidential Address to the British Association in 

 this same city of Oxford in 1894 : 



Few now are found to doubt that animals separated by 

 differences far exceeding those that distinguish what we 

 know as species have yet descended from common 

 ancestors. . . . Darwin has, as a matter of fact, disposed 

 of the doctrine of the immutability of species. 



Few, also, are now found to doubt not only that 

 doctrine, but also the doctrine that all life -forms 

 have a common origin ; plants and animals being 



