the phenomena of light.  No one objected to the latter because an undulation of light had never been arrested and measured.  Darwin offered an explanation of facts, and his book was full of new facts, all bearing on his theory.  Without asserting that every part of that theory had been confirmed, he maintained that it was the best explanation of the origin of species which had yet been offered.  As to the psychological distinction between men and animals, and the question of the 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.”  Nobody could say at what moment of the history of his development man became consciously intelligent.  The whole question was not so much one of a transmutation or transition of species as of the production of forms which became permanent.  The Ancon sheep was not produced gradually; it originated in the birth of the original parent of the whole stock, which had been kept up by a rigid system of artificial selection.

But if the question were to be treated, not as a matter for the calm investigation of science, but as a matter of sentiment, and if he were asked whether he would choose to be descended from the poor animal of low intelligence and stooping gait who grins and chatters as we pass, or from a man endowed with great ability and a splendid position, who should use these gifts to discredit and crush humble seekers after truth, he must hesitate what answer to make.

The actual words were not taken down at the time; they were finely eloquent, and gained effect from the clear, deliberate utterance; but the nearest approach to them was recorded in a letter of J.R.  Green, the future historian, written immediately after the meeting:—­

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 rather be a man—­a man of restless and versatile intellect—­who, not content with (an equivocal[1]) 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.

[Footnote 1:  Referring to this letter afterwards, my father felt certain that he had never used the word “equivocal.”  In this he was borne out by Prof.  Victor Carus and Prof.  Farrar, who were present.]