1860 THE OXFORD MEETING OF 1860 259 



Some experience of popular lecturing had convinced 

 me that the necessity of making things clear to unin- 

 structed people was one of the very best means of clearing 

 up the obscure corners in one's own mind. So, in 1860, 

 I took the Relation of Man to the Lower Animals for the 

 subject of the six lectures to working men which it was 

 my duty to deliver. It was also in I860 that this topic 

 was discussed before a jury of experts at the meeting of 

 the British Association at Oxford, and from that time a 

 sort of running fight on the same subject was carried on, 

 until it culminated at the Cambridge Meeting of the 

 Association in 1862, by my friend Sir W. Flower's 

 public demonstration of the existence in the apes of those 

 cerebral characters which had been said to be peculiar to 



The famous Oxford Meeting of 1860 was of no 

 small importance in Huxley's career. It was not 

 merely that he helped to save a great cause from 

 being stifled under misrepresentation and ridicule 

 that he helped to extort for it a fair hearing ; it was 

 now that he first made himself known in popular 

 estimation as a dangerous adversary in debate a 

 personal force in the world of science which could not 

 be neglected. From this moment he entered the 

 front fighting line in the most exposed quarter of 

 the field. 



Most unluckily, no contemporary account of his 

 own exists of the encounter. Indeed, the same cause 

 which prevented his writing home the story of the 

 day's work nearly led to his absence from the scene. 

 It was known that Bishop Wilberforce, whose first 

 class in mathematics gave him, in popular estimation, 



