THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 3 



Animal Kingdom. As this statement fell from the President's lips there 

 was at least one man in the audience whose spirit of opposition was 

 roused — Thomas Henry Huxley — Owen's young and rising antagonist. 



I have picked out Huxley from the audience because it is necessary, 

 for the development of my theme, that we should give him our attention 

 Owen and ^ or a momen t- We know what Huxley's feelings were towards 

 Huxley. Owen at the date of the Leeds Meeting. Six months before, 



he had told his sister that ' an internecine feud rages between Owen and 

 myself,' and on the eve of his departure for Leeds he wrote to Hooker : 

 ' The interesting question arises : shall I have a row with the great 0. 

 there ? ' I am glad to say the Leeds Meeting passed off amicably, but it 

 settled in Huxley's mind what the ' row ' was to be about when it came. 

 It was to concern Man's rightful position in the scale of living things. 



Two years later, in 1860, when this Association met in Oxford, Owen 



gave Huxley the opportunity he desired. In the course of a discussion 



Owen repeated the statement made at Leeds as to Man's 



Man's 



Position in separate position, claiming that the human brain had certain 



the Animal structural features never seen in the brain of anthropoid 

 Kingdom. L 



apes. Huxley's reply was a brief and emphatic denial with 



a promise to produce evidence in due course — which was faithfully kept. 

 This opening passage at arms between our protagonists was followed 

 two days later by that spectacular fight — the most memorable in the 

 history of our Association — in which the Bishop of Oxford, the repre- 

 sentative of Owen and of Orthodoxy, left his scalp in Huxley's hands. 

 To make his victory decisive and abiding, Huxley published, early in 

 1863, ' The Evidences of Man's Place in Nature,' a book which has a very 

 direct bearing on the subject of my discourse. It settled for all time that 

 Man's rightful position is among the Primates, and that as we anatomists 

 weigh evidence, his nearest living kin are the anthropoid apes. 



My aim is to make clear to you the foundations on which rest our 

 present-day conception of Man's origin. The address delivered by my 

 Owen's predecessor from this chair at the Leeds Meeting of 1858 has 



Opinion of given me the opportunity of placing Huxley's fundamental 

 Darwinism. ,. . __ , , .... 



conception ot Man s nature in a historical setting. I must 



now turn to another issue which Sir Richard Owen merely touched upon 



but which is of supreme interest to us now. He spent the summer in 



London, just as I have done, writing his address for Leeds and keeping 



an eye on what was happening at scientific meetings. In his case some- 



B 2 



