th 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.
From the incomplete reports of the debate that were published, it is
difficult to gain a very clear idea of the Bishop's speech; but it is
certain that it was eloquent and facile, and that it appealed strongly
to the religious prejudices of the majority of the audience. He ended
by a gibe which, under ordinary circumstances, might have passed
simply as the rude humour of a popular orator, but which in that
electric atmosphere stung Huxley into a retort that has become
historical. He asked Huxley whether he was related by his
grandfather's or grandmother's side to an ape. Huxley replied:

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.

An eye-witness has told the present writer that Huxley's speech
produced little effect at the time. In the minds of those of the
audience best qualified to weigh biological arguments, there was
little doubt but that he had refuted Owen, and simply dispelled the
vaporous effusions of the Bishop; but the majority of the audience
retained the old convictions. The combat was removed to a wider
tribunal. From that time forwards Huxley, by a series of essays,
addresses, and investigations, continued almost to the end of his
life, tried to convince, and succeeded in convincing, the intellectual
world. At the risk of wearying by repetition we shall again insist
upon the side of Darwinism