i860 speech at OXFORD igg 



John Richard Green, then an undergraduate, to his friend, 

 afterwards Professor Boyd Dawkins * : — 



I asserted — 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 rather 

 be a man — a man of restless and versatile intellect — who, not 

 content with an equivocal f 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 preju- 

 dice, i 



Further, Mr. A. G. Vernon-Harcourt, F.R..S., Reader in 

 Chemistry at the University of Oxford, writes to me : — 



The Bishop had rallied your father as to the descent from a 

 monkey, asking as a sort of joke how recent this had been, 

 whether it was his grandfather or further back. Your father, 

 in replying on this point, first explained that the suggestion was 

 of descent through thousands of generations from a common 

 ancestor, and then went on to this effect — " But if this question 

 is treated, not as a matter for the calm investigation of science, 

 but as a matter of sentiment, and if I am asked whether I would 

 choose to be descended from the poor animal of low intelligence 

 and stooping gait, who grins and chatters as we pass, or from 

 a man, endowed with great ability and a splendid position, who 

 should use these gifts " [here, as the point became clear, there 

 was a great outburst of applause, which mostly drowned the 

 end of the sentence] " to discredit and crush humble seekers 

 after truth, I hesitate what answer to make." 



* The writer in Macmillan' s tells me : " I cannot quite accept Mr. 

 J. R. Green's sentences as your father's, though I didn't doubt that 

 they convey the sense ; but then I think that only a shorthand writer 

 could reproduce Mr. Huxley's singularly beautiful style — so simple 

 and so incisive. The sentence given is much too ' Green.' " 



\ My father once told me that he did not remember using the word 

 " equivocal " in this speech. (See his letter below.) The late Professor 

 Victor Carus had the same impression, which is corroborated by Pro- 

 fessor Farrar. 



\ As the late Henry Fawcett wrote in Macmillan' s Afas^azine, i860 : — 

 "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." 



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