"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 success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure 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." A witness says: "The effect was tremendous. One lady fainted and had to be carried out; I, for one jumped from my seat." Another witness says: "I never saw such a display of fierce party spirit," and speaks of "the looks of bitter hatred" cast upon those who were on Huxley's side. Perhaps it is not trying to shape great complexities too definitely, to say that the conflict of which that was one episode, was the third of the civilized world's greatest intellectual struggles--the establishment of the Christian church, the reformation of it, and the determination of its true relation to the progress of knowledge. The last conflict, however, was a most hopeful illustration of the progress made since the first two, in that it involved no exposure of victims to the lions of the arena, no Nero's torches, no Inquisition, no Thirty-Years' War, no destruction of venerable and beautiful monuments, or of institutions for charity or education. But of course that conflict of the last century, like all others, had its pains; yet as it did not directly touch the person or the pocket of the average man, he cared very little about it. Nevertheless it has filtered down into his very language, and when he is the sort of average man who likes to use big words, his share of the victors' spoils includes the pleasure of frequently uttering, without quite understanding, such terms as _environment_, _differentiation_, and even _integration_, while the word _evolution_ has become such a matter-of-course term that he and everybody else use it unconsciously--unconscious not only of most of what it implies, but even of their indebtedness to the men from whom they got it.[2] [2] In this connection there was something said about Herbert Spencer in our Number 16. Of those men, one of the most important, and far the most important in America, was John Fiske. The recent publication of his _Life and Letters, by John S. Clarke_, (Houghton-Mifflin Co.) gives occasion to say something about him and his part in the great conflict.