In 1860 he visited Oxford, where the British Association was holding its meeting. He read a paper in which he had the hardihood to attack the caustic Whewell, assailing his preface to the works of Richard Jones. A large meeting gathered to witness the encounter. ‘Fawcett had learned by heart a sentence from Whewell’s preface. Whewell replied and repudiated the phrases quoted. Fawcett slowly and accurately repeated the words, which Whewell again disavowed. Then Fawcett called to his secretary to produce the volume in which the unlucky sentence had been marked. The Chairman read it out, when Fawcett’s quotation appeared to be perfectly correct. He thus gained an apparently conclusive triumph.’ ‘There were not a half-dozen people in the room,’ Fawcett observed afterwards, ‘who would have understood if I had got the best of the argument as to the inductive method; but they all heard the passage repeated distinctly three times.’ Though the younger man had unquestionably routed this senior, Whewell took his defeat magnanimously, and was from that time on excellent terms with his conqueror. CHAPTER X THE YOUNG ECONOMIST Championing Darwin—Darwin at Downe—Salisbury Gossip—Meeting Mill—Fawcett for Lincoln and the Union—John Bright’s Dog—Chair of Political Economy. [Sidenote: Championing Darwin.] In consequence of that Oxford meeting Fawcett entered another arena. Bishop Wilberforce, representing the attitude of many not narrow-minded men, took that occasion to attack Darwin’s recently published _Origin of Species_. Fawcett, indignant at the theological onslaught on the new theories, published an article in _Macmillan’s Magazine_ in which he valiantly took up the gauntlet for Darwin. Now, when evolution has become so much a part of our accepted and automatic thought, when we realise that science can in no way disprove religion, but if anything recommends it on a scientific basis, making the wonder of creation more real, it seems quaint to remember and difficult to appreciate that in Fawcett’s day the great evolutionist was hated as an iconoclast whose teachings would undermine religion, that Darwin was actually anathema to the orthodox and the pious minded. Fawcett writes with his usual clearness, stating the true and logical position of Darwin’s theory; distinguishing carefully between a fruitful hypothesis and a scientific demonstration; exhibiting the general nature of the argument and the geological difficulty with great clearness, and taking some pains to prove that religion is in no danger from Darwinism. In any case, he says, ‘life must have been originally introduced by an act of creative will.’ He restated these arguments at the next year’s meeting of the British Association in Manchester. Although this controversy for his part went little further, it led to some correspondence with Darwin, from whose letters it is of interest to quote: