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. Unfortunately the Bishop, hurried along on the current of his own eloquence, so far forgot himself as to push his attempted advantage to the verge of personality in a telling passage in which he turned round and addressed Huxley whether he was related by his grandfather's or his grandmother's side to an ape.
Huxley's reply was nearly as forceful and eloquent as was the attack of the Bishop, and much more firmly grounded in scientific knowledge. In concluding, he came to the Bishop's question about ancestry, and delivered a keen rejoinder. "I asserted," he said, "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 aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issues by eloquent digressions, and skilled appeal to religious prejudice."
The excitement was then at its height. A woman fainted and had to be carried out, men gesticulated and shouted at each other. FitzRoy, Darwin's old friend, rushed about brandishing a bible and trying to make impassioned appeals to the authority of "The Book".[1] Finally things quieted down so that discussion
- ↑ Poulton, Darwin and the Origin of Species, p. 66.
