198 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, xiv 



did not dawn upon Sir Benjamin until after Huxley had 

 completed his " forcible and eloquent " answer to the sci- 

 entific part of the Bishop's argument, and proceeded to 

 make his famous retort.* 



On this (continues the writer in Macmillan's Magazine) Mr. 

 Huxley slowly and deliberately arose. A slight tall figure, stern 

 and pale, very quiet and very grave,f he stood before us and 

 spoke those tremendous 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. He was not ashamed to have a monkey 

 for his ancestor ; but he would be ashamed to be connected with 

 a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth. No one 

 doubted his meaning, and the effect was tremendous. One lady 

 fainted and had to be carried out; I, for one, jumped out of 

 my seat. 



The fullest and probably most accurate account of these 

 concluding words is the following, from a letter of the late 



* The Athenaum reports him as saying that Darwin's theory was 

 an explanation of phenomena in Natural History, as the undulatory 

 theory was of the phenomena of light. No one objected to that theory 

 because an undulation of light had never been arrested and measured. 

 Darwin's theory was an explanation of facts, and his book was full of 

 new facts, all bearing on his theory. Without asserting that every 

 part of that theory had been confirmed, he maintained that it was the 

 best explanation of the origin of species which had yet been offered. 

 With regard to the psychological distinction between men and ani- 

 mals, man himself was once a monad— a mere atom, and nobody 

 could say at what moment in the history of his development he 

 became consciously intelligent. The question was not so much one 

 of a transmutation or transition of species, as of the production of 

 forms which became permanent. 



Thus the short-legged sheep of America was not produced grad- 

 ually, but originated in the birth of an original parent of the whole 

 stock, which had been kept up by a rigid system of artificial selec- 

 tion. 



f "Young, cool, quiet, scientific — scientific in fact and in treat- 

 ment." — J. R. Green. A certain piquancy must have been added to 

 the situation by the superficial resemblance in feature between the 

 two men, so different in temperament and expression. Indeed next 

 day at Hardwicke, a friend came up to Mr. Fanning and asked who 

 his guest was, saying, "Surely it is the son of the Bishop of Ox- 

 ford." 



