202 REMINISCENCES OF HUXLEY 
and begged to be informed if the learned gentleman 
was really willing to be regarded as the descendant of 
amonkey. Eager self-confidence had blinded the 
bishop to the tactical blunder in thus coarsely inviting 
a retort. Huxley was instantly upon his feet witha 
speech demolishing the bishop’s card house of mis- 
takes; and at the close he observed that since a 
question of personal preferences had been very im- 
properly brought into the discussion of a scientific 
theory, he felt free to confess that if the alternatives 
were descent, on the one hand, from a respectable 
monkey, or on the other from a bishop of the English 
Church who could stoop to such misrepresentations 
and sophisms as the audience had lately listened to, he 
should declare in favour 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 whispered to his neighbour, 
Sir Benjamin Brodie, “The Lord hath delivered him into 
my hands!” a remark which that excellent old gentle- 
man received with a stolid stare. Huxley sat quiet un- 
til the chairman called him up. His concluding retort 
seems to have been most carefully reported by John 
Richard Green, then a student at Oxford, in a letter to 
his friend, 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 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 acquaintance, only to obscure 
them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention 
