INTRODUCTION xi 



spirit, emptiness, and unfairness" to a large and distin- 

 guished audience. He concluded by turning to Huxley, 

 who sat on the platform, and asking "with a smiling 

 insolence" whether it was "through his grandfather or 

 his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a 

 monkey?" At this stooping to personality Huxley is 

 said to have struck his hand upon his knee, exclaiming 

 to his neighbor, "The Lord hath delivered him into 

 mine hands." Huxley's reply created a tremendous 

 sensation, so tremendous that no one could remember 

 exactly what he said. What was clear to all was that 

 he had delivered a stinging and characteristic rebuke to 

 that smug orthodoxy which repudiated science when 

 it seemed to threaten its authority. The most accurate 

 account of the reply, according to Leonard Huxley, is 

 that of J. R. Green. 



"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 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." 



II 



Next to his work as a scientist Huxley is perhaps best 

 known for his work in education, particularly in his own 

 field of scientific education. Like Matthew Arnold, who 

 was even more actively eneaeed in educational reform, 

 he endeavoured, in one of the darkest ages for education 

 in England, to make accessible to all a substantial and 



