266 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP. XIV 



grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his 

 descent from a monkey ? " ] 



This was the fatal mistake of his speech. Huxley 

 instantly grasped the tactical advantage which the 

 descent to personalities gave him. He turned to Sir 

 Benjamin Brodie, who was sitting beside him, and 

 emphatically striking his hand upon his knee, ex- 

 claimed, "The Lord hath delivered him into mine 

 hands." The bearing of the exclamation did not 

 dawn upon Sir Benjamin until after Huxley had 

 completed his " forcible and eloquent " answer to the 

 scientific part of the Bishop's argument, and proceeded 

 to make his famous retort. 2 



1 "Reminiscences of a Grandmother," Macmillan's Magazine, 

 October 1898. Professor Farrar thinks this version of what the 

 Bishop said is slightly inaccurate. His impression is that the 

 words actually used seemed at the moment flippant and iinscientific 

 rather than insolent, vulgar, or personal. The Bishop, he writes, 

 " had been talking of the perpetuity of species of Birds ; and then, 

 denying a fortiori the derivation of the species Man from Ape, he 

 rhetorically invoked the aid of feeling, and said, ' If any one were 

 to be willing to trace his descent through an ape as his grandfather, 

 would he be willing to trace his descent similarly on the side of his 

 grandmother 1 ' His false humour was an attempt to arouse the 

 antipathy about degrading woman to the quadrumana. Your 

 father's reply showed there was vulgarity as well as folly in the 

 Bishop's words ; and the impression distinctly was, that the 

 Bishop's party, as they left the room, felt abashed, and recognised 

 that the Bishop had forgotten to behave like a perfect gentleman." 



2 The Athenaeum reports him as saying that Darwin's theory 

 was an explanation of phenomena in Natural History, as the un- 

 dulatory theory was of the phenomena of light. No one objected 

 to that theory because an undulation of light had never been 

 arrested and measured. Darwin's theory was an explanation of 

 facts, and his book was full of new facts, all bearing on his theory. 

 Without asserting that every part of that theory had been con- 

 firmed, he maintained that it was the best explanation of the origin 

 of species which had yet been offered. With regard to the psycho- 



