268 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY C HAP, XIV 



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 restless 

 and versatile intellect who, not content with an equi- 

 vocal 1 success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into 

 scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, 

 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. 2 



Further, Mr. A. G. Vernon - Harcourt, F.K.S., 

 Keader in Chemistry at the University of Oxford, 

 writes to me : 



The Bishop had rallied your father as to the descent 

 from a monkey, asking as a sort of joke how recent this 

 had been, whether it was his grandfather or further back. 

 Your father, in replying on this point, first explained that 

 the suggestion was of descent through thousands of genera- 

 tions from a common ancestor, and then went on to this 

 effect " But if this question is treated, not as a matter for 

 the calm investigation of science, but as a matter of senti- 

 ment, and if I am asked whether I would choose to be 

 descended from the poor animal of low intelligence and 

 stooping gait, who grins and chatters as we pass, or from 

 a man, endowed with great ability and a splendid posi- 

 tion, who should use these gifts" [here, as the point 

 became clear, there was a great outburst of applause, 



1 My father once told me that he did not remember using the 

 word "equivocal" in this speech. (See his letter below.) The 

 late Professor Victor Carus had the same impression, which is corro- 

 borated by Professor Farrar. 



2 As the late Henry Fawcett wrote in Macmillan's Magazine, 

 1860 : " The retort was so justly deserved, and so inimitable in its 

 manner, that no one who was present can ever forget the impression 

 that it made." 



