1860 SPEECH AT OXFORD 267 



On this (continues the writer in Macmillan's Magazine) 

 Mr. Huxley slowly and deliberately arose. A slight tall 

 figure, stern and pale, very quiet and very grave, 1 he 

 stood before us and spoke those tremendous words words 

 which no one seems sure of now, nor, I think, could 

 remember just after they were spoken, for their meaning 

 took away our breath, though it left us in no doubt as to 

 what it was. He was not ashamed to have a monkey for 

 his ancestor ; but he would be ashamed to be connected 

 with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth. 

 No one doubted his meaning, and the effect was tremend- 

 ous. One lady fainted and had to be carried out ; I, for 

 one, jumped out of my seat. 



The fullest and probably most accurate account of 

 these concluding words is the following, from a letter 

 of the late John Eichard Green, then an under- 

 graduate, to his friend, afterwards Professor Boyd 

 Dawkins 2 : 



logical distinction between men and animals, man himself was once 

 a monad a mere atom, and nobody could say at what moment in 

 the history of his development he became consciously intelligent. 

 The question was not so much one of a transmutation or transition 

 of species, as of the production of forms which became permanent. 

 Thus the short -legged sheep of America was not produced 

 gradually, but originated in the birth of an original parent of the 

 whole stock, which had been kept up by a rigid system of artificial 

 selection. 



1 "Young, cool, quiet, scientific scientific in fact and in treat- 

 ment. " J. R. Green. A certain piquancy must have been added 

 to the situation by the superficial resemblance in feature between 

 the two men, so different in temperament and expression. Indeed 

 ne*t day at Hardwicke, a friend came up to Mr. Fanning and 

 asked who his guest was, saying, " Surely it is the son of the 

 Bishop of Oxford." 



2 The writer in Macmillan's tells me : " I cannot quite accept 

 Mr. J. R. Green's sentences as your father's, though I didn't doubt 

 that they convey the sense ; but then I think that only a shorthand 

 writer could reproduce Mr. Huxley's singularly beautiful style so 

 simple and so incisive. The sentence given is much too ' Green. ' " 



