FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote D:  See E. Clodd’s Pioneers of Evolution, London, 1897, and Osborn’s From the Greeks to Darwin, New York, 1896.]

CHAPTER VII

THE BATTLE FOR EVOLUTION

Huxley’s Prevision of the Battle—­The Causes of the Battle—­The Times Review—­Sir Richard Owen attacks Darwinism in the Edinburgh Review—­Bishop Wilberforce attacks in the Quarterly Review—­Huxley’s Scathing Replies—­The British Association Debates at Oxford—­Huxley and Wilberforce—­Resume of Huxley’s Exact Position with Regard to Evolution and to Natural Selection.

When Huxley wrote thanking Darwin for the first copy of the Origin, he warned him of the annoyance and abuse he might expect from those whose opinions were too suddenly disturbed by the new exposition of evolution, and assured him of the strongest personal support: 

“I trust you will not allow yourself to be in any way disgusted or annoyed by the considerable abuse and misrepresentation which, unless I greatly mistake, is in store for you.  Depend upon it, you have earned the lasting gratitude of all thoughtful men; and as to the curs which will bark and yelp, you must recollect that some of your friends, at any rate, are endowed with an amount of combativeness which (though you have often and justly rebuked it) may stand you in good stead.

      “I am sharpening my claws and beak in readiness.”

Huxley was absolutely right in his prediction as to the magnitude of the prejudices to be overcome before evolution became accepted, and for the next thirty years of his life he was the leader in the battle for Darwinism.  It was natural that the new views, especially in their extension to man himself, should arouse the keenest opposition.  To those of the present generation, who have grown up in an atmosphere impregnated by the doctrine of descent, the position of the world in 1860 seems “older than a tale written in any book.”  As we have tried to shew in the preceding chapter, biological science was partially prepared; the mutability of species and the orderly succession of organic life were in the air.  But the application of the doctrine to man came as a greater shock to civilised sentiment than would have occurred a century earlier.  It came as a disaster even to the clearest and calmest intellects, for it seemed to drag down to the dirt the nobility of man.  Out of the fierce flame of the French Revolution, there had come purged and clean the conception of man as an individual and soul.  As this century advanced, the conception of the dignity and worth of each individual man, rich or poor, bond or free, had spread more and more widely, bearing as its fruit the emancipation of slaves, the spread of political freedom, the amelioration of the conditions of the dregs of humanity, the right of all to education,