446 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. YOL. XLV. No. 1167 



rightly believed that an appeal would be 

 made to the emotions and to prejudice, and 

 he feared no good could come from the 

 scientific argument. It was the tremendous 

 success which he here achieved that fully 

 decided him to take up the cudgels for Dar- 

 win, and at the sacrifice of being branded 

 as a heretic during much of his lifetime, he 

 was destined to go down to posterity not 

 only as the magnificent protagonist of the 

 doctrine of evolution, but as the redoubt- 

 able champion of freedom of thought within 

 the whole realm of science. 



Of the encounter at the Oxford meeting 

 there are a number of contemporary ac- 

 counts, one of which says of the Bishop's 

 address : 



In a Ught, scoffing tone, florid and fluent, he as- 

 sured us that there was nothing in the idea of 

 evolution, rock pigeons were what roek pigeons 

 had always been. Then turning to his antagonist 

 with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was 

 it through his grandfather or his grandmother 

 that he claimed his descent from a monkey. 



Huxley was sitting beside the venerable 

 Sir Benjamin Brodie, and at this descent to 

 personalities he struck his hand upon his 

 knee and turning to his neighbor exclaimed, 

 "The Lord hath delivered him into mine 

 hands." Without at all comprehending, 

 Sir Benjamin stared vacantly and the 

 meaning of Huxley's words did not dawn 

 upon him until Huxley had arrived at his 

 famous retort. When the storm of ap- 

 plause which followed the Bishops 's ad- 

 dress had subsided the president called 

 upon Huxley to reply. 



On this Mr. Huxley slowly and deliberately arose. 

 A sUght tall figure, stern and pale, very quiet and 

 very grave, he stood before us and spoke those tre- 

 mendous 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. 



There was first a calm scientific discus- 



sion of Darwin's theory after which Hux- 

 ley turned to the Bishop to say : 



I asserted — and I repeat — that a man has no 

 reason to be ashamed of having an ape for Ms 

 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 a 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 at- 

 tention of his hearers from the real point at 

 issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals 

 to religious prejudice. 



"No one doubted his meaning, and the 

 effect was tremendous. One lady fainted 

 and had to be carried out; I, for one," 

 says the chronicler, "jumped out of my 

 seat. ' ' 



If the emancipation of science from coer- 

 cion or restraint from without had arrived 

 with the final triumph of the doctrine of 

 evolution, can it be truly said that theories 

 are constructed even in this generation as 

 the result of a process of wholly untram- 

 meled reasoning; or, on the other hand, is 

 it the fact that with the frailties inherent 

 in human nature they still embody ele- 

 ments of weakness which are due either to 

 the deficiencies in training of their authors, 

 to prejudices or bias conditioned upon time 

 or place, or to some other cause ? 



It is usually considered to be the special 

 function of a president to recount in his 

 address in particular the great triumphs of 

 science, and to touch but lightly, if at all, 

 upon any less encouraging aspects of his 

 science. I propose in the time that re- 

 mains to me to pursue a somewhat different 

 course, and by the use of examples selected 

 from the field of my own special studies to 

 discuss what may perhaps be called the 

 psychology of theories and the conditions 

 which determine their acceptance. 



To some extent it is inevitable that 

 theories should reflect the individuality or 

 the environment of their authors. This is 



