200 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, xiv 



No doubt your father's words were better than these, and 

 they gained effect from his clear, deliberate utterance, but in 

 outline and in scale this represents truly what was said. 



After the commotion was over, " some voices called for 

 Hooker, and his name having been handed up, the President 

 invited him to give his view of the theory from the Botanical 

 side. This he did, demonstrating that the Bishop, by his 

 own showing, had never grasped the principles of the 

 ' Origin,' and that he was absolutely ignorant of the ele- 

 ments of botanical science. The Bishop made no reply, 

 and the meeting broke up." * 



Account of the Oxford Meeting by the Rev. W. H. 

 Freemantle (in Charles Darwin, his Life Told, &c., 

 1892, p. 238). 



The Bishop of Oxford attacked Darwin, at first playfully, 

 but at last in grim earnest. It was known that the Bishop had 

 written an article against Darwin in the last Quarterly Re- 

 view; f it was also rumoured that Professor Owen had been 

 staying at Cuddesdon and had primed the Bishop, who was to 

 act as mouthpiece to the great Palaeontologist, who did not him- 

 self dare to enter the lists. The Bishop, however, did not show 

 himself master of the facts, and made one serious blunder. A 

 fact which had been much dwelt on as confirmatory of Darwin's 

 idea of variation, was that a sheep had been born shortly before 

 in a flock in the North of England, having an addition of one 

 to the vertebras of the spine. The Bishop was declaring with 

 rhetorical exaggeration that there was hardly any evidence on 

 Darwin's side. "What have they to bring forward?" he ex- 

 claimed. " Some rumoured statement about a long-legged 

 sheep." But he passed on to banter : " I should like to ask 

 Professor Huxley, who is sitting by me, and is about to tear 

 me to pieces when I have sat down, as to his belief in being 

 descended from an ape. Is it on his grandfather's or his grand- 

 mother's side that the ape ancestry comes in ? " And then tak- 

 ing a graver tone, he asserted, in a solemn peroration, that Dar- 

 win's views were contrary to the revelation of God in the 

 Scriptures. Professor Huxley was unwilling to respond: biit 



* Life of Dar7mn^ I.e. 



\ It appeared in the ensuing number for July. 



