BIOGRAPHICAL (1854-1870) 27 



appeals to religious prejudice." The exact wording 

 of the crushing retort has doubtless been lost in the 

 excitement of the immediate moment, and from the 

 thunders of applause from the audience at the point 

 when Huxley referred to a man who used great 

 gifts, &c. What was coming was so obvious, that 

 the probability is the exact words of the sentence 

 were lost. But there was no doubt as to their signi- 

 ficance, nor the impression they made. The meeting 

 closed with a speech from Hooker, who showed that 

 the Bishop knew nothing whatever about botanical 

 science, and still less about the principles of Darwin's 

 theory, to which the Bishop made no reply. The 

 jT" discussion, of course, on the point at issue by no 

 ^ means ended at Oxford — ^indeed, it may rather be 

 "^ said to have begun there — and it was carried on with 

 ^ vigour over the next two years, and especially until 

 Sir W. H. Flower's demonstrations at the Cambridge 

 ^ meeting of the British Association in 1862. 



We have dealt with this incident at some length 

 foi' two reasons. In the first place, it is one of 

 the most dramatic in the whole of Huxley's career, 

 and the one which, perhaps, of all others, stamped 

 him as the great expounder of Darwinism ; and, 

 secondly, because it showed for the first time that 

 there was going to be an open resistance to all 

 authority in intellectual matters, and that the idea 

 of behef in dogma, merely because it was stated, was 

 one which, for many men, was not longer tenable. 



At the Oxford meeting Huxley had stated that 

 he would take every opportunity of putting the 

 evidence of some of his opinions before the world, 

 and in 1860 he proceeded to do this in his papers 

 " On the Zoological Relations of Man with the Lower 



