1909.] BRYCE— RE.MIXISCE.NXES OF CHARLES DARWIN. xi 



To those he never replied. He showed the greatest dignity and the 

 greatest wisdom, never descending into the arena. But he soon found 

 champions, and among others he found one, who then first came into 

 notice and then first showed his remarkable controversial powers, 

 powers which he was fond of displaying — and indeed could not 

 help displaying, because w^hen a man has a gift he cannot help enjoy- 

 ing the use of it — I mean the late Professor Huxley. Huxley wag 

 then a comparatively young man. He embraced Mr. Darwin's doc- 

 trines with great eagerness, and he championed him with passionate 

 zeal. I recollect a little incident that happened about that time, which 

 may possibly be worth recalling to your memory. There was a meet- 

 ing of the British Association held not long after the " Origin of 

 Species " had appeared — I think within two or three years — at which 

 the then Bishop of Oxford, Dr. Samuel Wilberforce, was brought 

 down as an ecclesiastical champion to demolish Darwin. He was a 

 man of remarkable oratorical powers, with a quick, ready and 

 flexible mind, acute and witty, and able, like a practiced rhetorician, 

 to make the best of any case presented to him, with not much regard 

 to the truth of the facts or the soundness of the argument. There 

 occurred a controversy between him and Mr. Huxley at one of those 

 meetings. The bishop had made a clever and amusing speech, 

 in which he showed up what he conceived to be the weak points of 

 the Darwinian theory, and turned it, as far as he could, into ridicule 

 — asking the audience, with some scorn, whether they wished to be 

 descendants from apes, whether that w^as the kind of ancestors they 

 could look back to with pride, and sat down amid a tempest of 

 applause, after having, as his supporters thought, succeeded in 

 making the Darwinian theory not only improbable, but even con- 

 temptible. ^Ir. Huxley rose to reply, and after setting forth with 

 great force and ample knowledge his serious argument, observed 

 that the Bishop of Oxford had asked whether any man there would 

 like to have an ape for his ancestor. For his part, he would say 

 only this, that if he were obliged to choose between having for his 

 ancestor an ape, or having for his ancestor a man who, enjoying 

 a high position and a great reputation, being possessed of brilliant 

 oratorical powders and a fund of sarcastic wit, were to use that 

 position and those powers for the sake of obstructing the progress 



