214 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION. 



special creation between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint- 

 Hilaire in the French Academy in 1830. 



Both Huxley and Wilberforce were doughty 

 champions. The scene of combat, the Museum 

 Library, was crammed to ' suffocation. Fainting 

 women were carried out. There had been " Words."' 

 between Owen and Huxley on the previous Thurs- 

 day. Owen contended that there were certain funda- 

 mental differences between the brains of man and 

 apes. Huxley met this with " direct and unqualified 

 contradiction," and pledged himself to " justify that 

 unusual procedure elsewhere." No wonder that the 

 atmosphere was electric. The bishop was up to 

 time. Declamation usurped the vacant place of ar- 

 gument in his speech, and the declamation became 

 acrid. He finished his harangue by asking Huxley 

 whether he was related by his grandfather's or 

 grandmother's side to an ape. " The Lord hath de- 

 livered him into my hands," whispered Huxley to 

 a friend at his side, as he rose to reply. After set- 

 ting his opponent an example in demonstrating his 

 case by evidence which, although refuting Owen, 

 evoked no admission of error from him then or ever 

 after, Huxley referred to the personal remark of 

 Wilberforce. And this is what he said — 



I asserted, and I repesit, 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 con- 

 tent with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, 

 plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real 



