62 



PROGRESS OF SCIENCE 



as ' the descent of man from the ape/ Not all the 

 previous dissensions between scientific and religious 

 thought had prepared men's minds for so flat a con- 

 tradiction of the circumstantial scriptural statement 

 concerning the creation of man. Here, moreover, 

 was a subject that was capable of scientific discussion, 

 at least on general lines, in terms intelligible to the 

 general public ; unlike some which have caught the 

 public fancy, perhaps, by reason of their very unin- 

 telligibility save to the trained intellect. And the 

 British Association, known in journalistic term as the 

 ' parliament of science/ was the obvious body under 

 the auspices of which the safety-valve of speech (as 

 distinct from that of the pen) might be released. 

 Yet it is in a measure characteristic of our body that 

 the discussions of the Darwinian theory in the Section 

 of Botany and Zoology, which made the Oxford 

 meeting in 1860 the most widely famous ever held, 

 were not, apparently, organised as occasions for the 

 public ventilation of the whole matter : the cele- 

 brated debate between Owen and Huxley during 

 this meeting, and subsequently that between Samuel 

 Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, Huxley, Hooker and 

 others, followed almost fortuitously upon the reading 

 of papers not, in themselves, of special distinction. 

 It is also, incidentally, an unhappy commentary on 

 the limitations of the Association in reporting its 

 own transactions limitations for which no remedy 

 has ever been found that no reference whatever to 

 these two pre-eminent episodes appears in the annual 

 report for 1860, beyond the jejune abstracts of the 

 two papers (by Dr. C. G. B. Daubeny and Professor 

 Draper of New York respectively) which opened the 

 way for the protagonists. 



