, that 'light would be thrown on the origin of man
and his history'--yet friends and foes alike at once drew what was the
necessary corollary from the theory. It is as amusing, as it is
surprising at the present day, to recall the storm of prejudice which
was excited. At the British Association Meeting at Oxford in 1860, after
an American professor had indignantly asked the question, 'Are we a
fortuitous concourse of atoms?' as a comment on Darwin's views, Dr
Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, ended a clever but flippant
attack on the _Origin_ by enquiring of Huxley, who was present as
Darwin's champion, if it 'was through his grandfather or his grandmother
that he claimed his descent from a monkey?'

Huxley made the famous and well-deserved retort:--

'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 ashamed 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 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[138].'

The violent attack on Darwin's views by the once-famous Bishop of Oxford
was outdone, a few years later, by an even more absurd outburst on the
part of Benjamin Disraeli, who--after stigmatising Darwinism as the
question 'Is man an ape or an angel?'--declared magniloquently to the
episcopal chairman, 'My Lord, I am on the side of the angels!'

But in spite of attacks like these and numerous bitter pasquinades and
comic cartoons--perhaps to some extent in consequence of them--Darwin's
views became widely known and eagerly discussed, so that the circulation
of the _Origin of Species_ went up by leaps and bounds. Nevertheless, as
Huxley said, 'years had to pass away before misrepresentation, ridicule
and denunciation, ceased to be the most notable constituents of the
multitudinous criticisms of his work which poured from the press.'

Among his contemporary men of science Darwin could at first count few
converts. Hooker, whose candid and valuable criticisms of his friend's
work had been continued up to the very end during its composition, did
an eminent service to the