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 Thursday. Owen contended that there were certain fundamental
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 argument 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 delivered
him into my hands," whispered Huxley to a friend at his side, as he rose
to reply. After setting 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 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 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.
Perhaps the best comment on a piece of what is now ancient history is to
quote the admissions made by Lord Salisbury--a rigid High Churchman--in
his presidential address to the British Association in this same city of
Oxford in 1894--
Few now are found to doubt that animals separated by differences far
exceeding those that distinguish what we know as species have yet
descended from common ancestors.... Darwin has, as a matter of fact,
disposed of the doctrine of the immutability of species.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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