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 that Huxley fought for and triumphed for.

Long before the time of Darwin and Huxley, almost at the beginning of recorded thought, philosophers busied themselves with the wonderful diversity of the living world and with speculations as to how it had assumed its present form.  From the earliest times to this century, theories as to the living world fell into one or other of two main groups.  The key-note of one group was the fixity of species:  the belief that from their first appearance species were separate, independent entities, one never springing from another, new species never arising by the modification in different directions of descendants of already existing species.  The key-note of the other group of theories was the idea of progressive change:  that animals and plants as they passed along the stream of time were continually being moulded by the forces surrounding them, and that the farther back the mind could go in imagination the fewer and simpler species would be; until, in the first beginning, all the existing diverse kinds of living creatures would converge to a single point.  It may be that, on the whole,