130 Annual Report of the Council. 



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 be a man, a man of restless and versatile 

 intellect, who, not content with an equivocal 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." A writer in a contemporary periodi- 

 cal observes : " 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." 



It was one of Huxley's most admirable characteristics 

 that he was always ready to take up the cudgels on behalf 

 of any cause which he believed to be right, at whatever 

 risk of obloquy and unpopularity; thus we find him at the 

 Geological Society in 1862 supporting Ramsay's newly- 

 advanced theory of the excavation of lake basins, when 

 it was received with coolness or opposition by men so 

 eminent as Lyell and Falconer. In the same spirit he 

 carried the doctrine of evolution to its extreme logical 

 limits, and lost no opportunity of expounding his views. 

 His addresses on " Man's Place in Nature " and on " The 

 Physical Basis of Life" in particular roused a storm of 

 discussion. Respecting the latter, he says it "was intended 

 to contain a plain and untechnical statement of modern 

 biological thought, accompanied by a protest from the 

 philosophical side against what is commonly called 

 ' materialism.' The result of my well-meant efforts I find 

 to be that I am generally credited with having invented 

 'protoplasm' in the interests of 'materialism.' My unlucky 

 lay sermon has been attacked by microscopists ignorant 

 alike of biology and philosophy ; by philosophers not very 



