Charles Darwin: His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter, and in a Selected Series of His Published Letters

by Charles Darwin

"The excitement was tremendous. The Lecture-room, in which it had been arranged that the discussion should be held, proved far too small for the audience, and the meeting adjourned to the Library of the Museum, which was crammed to suffocation long before the champions entered the lists. The numbers were estimated at from 700 to 1000. Had it been term-time, or had the general public been admitted, it would have been impossible to have accommodated the rush to hear the oratory of the bold Bishop.[212] Professor Henslow, the President of Section D, occupied the chair, and wisely announced in limine that none who had not valid arguments to bring forward on one side or the other, would be allowed to address the meeting: a caution that proved necessary, for no fewer than four combatants had their utterances burked by him, because of their indulgence in vague declamation.

"The Bishop was up to time, and spoke for full half-an-hour with inimitable spirit, emptiness and unfairness. It was evident from his handling of the subject that he had been 'crammed' up to the throat, and that he knew nothing at first hand; in fact, he used no argument not to be found in his Quarterly article.[213] He ridiculed Darwin badly, and Huxley savagely, but all in such dulcet tones, so persuasive a manner, and in such well-turned periods, that I who had been inclined to blame the President for allowing a discussion that could serve no scientific purpose, now forgave him from the bottom of my heart."

What follows is from notes most kindly supplied by the Hon. and Rev. W. H. Fremantle, who was an eye-witness of the scene.

"The Bishop of Oxford attacked Darwin, at first playfully but at last in grim earnest. It was known that the Bishop had written an article against Darwin in the last Quarterly Review: it was also rumoured that Professor Owen had been staying at Cuddesden and had primed the Bishop, who was to act as mouthpiece to the great Palæontologist, who did not himself dare to enter the lists. The Bishop, however, did not show himself master of the facts, and made one serious blunder. A fact which had been much dwelt on as confirmatory of Darwin's idea of variation, was that a sheep had been born shortly before in a flock in the North of England, having an addition of one to the vertebræ of the spine. The Bishop was declaring with rhetorical exaggeration that there was hardly any actual evidence on Darwin's side. 'What have they to bring forward?' he exclaimed. 'Some rumoured statement about a long-legged sheep.' But he passed on to banter: 'I should like to ask Professor Huxley, who is sitting by me, and is about to tear me to pieces when I have sat down, as to his belief in being descended from an ape. Is it on his grandfather's or his grandmother's side that the ape ancestry comes in?' And then taking a graver tone, he asserted in a solemn peroration that Darwin's views were contrary to the revelations of God in the Scriptures. Professor Huxley was unwilling to respond: but he was called for and spoke with his usual incisiveness and with some scorn. 'I am here only in the interests of science,' he said, 'and I have not heard anything which can prejudice the case of my august client.' Then after showing how little competent the Bishop was to enter upon the discussion, he touched on the question of Creation. 'You say that development drives out the Creator. But you assert that God made you: and yet you know that you yourself were originally a little piece of matter no bigger than the end of this gold pencil-case.' Lastly as to the descent from a monkey, he said: 'I should feel it no shame to have risen from such an origin. But I should feel it a shame to have sprung from one who prostituted the gifts of culture and of eloquence to the service of prejudice and of falsehood.'

"Many others spoke. Mr. Gresley, an old Oxford don, pointed out that in human nature at least orderly development was not the necessary rule; Homer was the greatest of poets, but he lived 3000 years ago, and has not produced his like.

"Admiral Fitz-Roy was present, and said that he had often expostulated with his old comrade of the Beagle for entertaining views which were contradictory to the First Chapter of Genesis.

"Sir John Lubbock declared that many of the arguments by which the permanence of species was supported came to nothing, and instanced some wheat which was said to have come off an Egyptian mummy and was sent to him to prove that wheat had not changed since the time of the Pharaohs; but which proved to be made of French chocolate.[214] Sir Joseph (then Dr.) Hooker spoke shortly, saying that he had found the hypothesis of Natural Selection so helpful in explaining the phenomena of his own subject of Botany, that he had been constrained to accept it. After a few words from Darwin's old friend Professor Henslow who occupied the chair, the meeting broke up, leaving the impression that those most capable of estimating the arguments of Darwin in detail saw their way to accept his conclusions."

Many versions of Mr. Huxley's speech were current: the following report of his conclusion is from a letter addressed by the late John Richard Green, then an undergraduate, to a fellow-student, now Professor Boyd Dawkins:—"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."[215]

The following letter shows that Mr. Huxley's presence at this remarkable scene depended on so slight a chance as that of meeting a friend in the street; that this friend should have been Robert Chambers, so that the author of the Vestiges should have sounded the war-note for the battle of the Origin, adds interest to the incident. I have to thank Mr. Huxley for allowing the story to be told in words of his not written for publication.