The middle of 1860, however, was not a time for Huxley, in his capacity as Darwin's chief defender, to make truce with the enemy. In England a certain number of well-known scientific men had given a general support to Darwinism. From France, Germany, and America there had come some support and a good deal of cold criticism, but most people were simmering with disturbed emotions. The newspapers and the reviews were full of the new subject; political speeches and sermons were filled with allusions to it. Wherever educated people talked the conversation came round to the question of evolution. Were animals and plants the results of special creations, or were they, including man, the result of the gradual transformations of a few simple primitive types evolving under the stress of some such force as Darwin's natural selection? To many people it seemed to be a choice between a world with God and a world without God; and the accredited defenders of religion gathered every force of argument, of misrepresentation, conscious and unconscious, of respectability, and of prejudice to crush once for all the obnoxious doctrine and its obnoxious supporters. In the autumn of that year it fell that the meeting of the British Association, then coming into prominence as the annual parliament of the sciences, was to be held at Oxford. It was inevitable that evolution should be debated formally and informally in the sessions of the Association, and it must have seemed to the orthodox that there, in that beautiful city, its air vibrant with tinkling calls to faith, its halls and libraries crowded with the devout and the learned, its history and traditions alike calling on all to defend the old fair piety, in such an uncongenial air, the supporters of evolution must be overwhelmed. Almost the whole weight of the attack had to be resisted by Huxley. In the various sectional meetings he had combat after combat with professors and clerics. Of these dialectic fights the most notable were one with Owen on the anatomical structure of the brain, and another with Wilberforce upon the general question of evolution. Owen contended that there were anatomical differences not merely of degree but of kind between the brain of man and the brain of the highest ape, and his remarks were accepted by the audience as a complete and authoritative blow to the theory of descent. Huxley at once met Owen with a direct and flat contradiction, and pledged his reputation to justify his contradiction with all due detail on a further occasion. As a matter of fact, he did justify the contradiction, and no anatomist would now dream of attempting the support of the proposition rashly made by Owen; but, at the time, the position of Owen and the sympathies of the audience took away much of their effect from Huxley's words. Two days later, Wilberforce, in a scene of considerable excitement, made a long, eloquent, and declamatory speech against evolution and against Huxley.