22 HUXLEY 



no bigger than the end of this gold pencil-case ? " 

 Then followed the famous retort : — 



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 rest- 

 less and versatile intellect — who, not content with 

 success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into 

 scientific questions with which he has no real ac- 

 quaintance, 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. 1 



The rebuke was supplemented in an article in the 

 Natural History Review, January, 1861, on the 

 " Zoological Relation of Man with the Lower Ani- 

 mals," wherein Huxley redeemed his promise to re- 

 fute Owen, and proved that " the brains of the lower 

 true apes and monkeys differ far more widely from 

 the brain of the orang than the brain of the orang 

 differs from that of man." 2 



Whether [he says], as some think, man is, by his 

 origin, distinct from all other living beings, or 

 whether, on the other hand, as others suppose, he is 

 the result of the modification of some other mammal, 

 his duties and his aspirations must, I apprehend, re- 

 main the same. The proof of his claim to inde- 



1 There is a good portrait of Huxley at this time in Reminis- 

 cences of Oxford, by Rev. W. Tuckwell. 



2 P. 84. 



