seems sure of now, nor, I think, could remember just after they were spoken, for their meaning took away our breath, though it left us in no doubt as to what it was.  He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth.  No one doubted his meaning, and the effect was tremendous.  One lady fainted and had to be carried out; I, for one, jumped out of my seat.

The fullest and probably most accurate account of these concluding words is the following, from a letter of the late John Richard Green, then an undergraduate, to his friend, afterwards Professor Boyd Dawkins (The writer in “Macmillan’s” tells me:  “I cannot quite accept Mr. J.R.  Green’s sentences as your father’s; though I didn’t doubt that they convey the sense; but then I think that only a shorthand writer could reproduce Mr. Huxley’s singularly beautiful style—­so simple and so incisive.  The sentence given is much too ‘Green.’")]

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 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. (My father once told me that he did not remember using the word “equivocal” in this speech. (See his letter below.) The late Professor Victor Carus had the same impression, which is corroborated by Professor Farrar.) (As the late Henry Fawcett wrote in “Macmillan’s Magazine,” 1860:—­“The retort was so justly deserved, and so inimitable in its manner, that no one who was present can ever forget the impression that it made.”)

Further, Mr. A.G.  Vernon-Harcourt, F.R.S., Reader in Chemistry at the University of Oxford, writes to me:—­

The Bishop had rallied your father as to the descent from a monkey, asking as a sort of joke how recent this had been, whether it was his grandfather or further back.  Your father, in replying on this point, first explained that the suggestion was of descent through thousands of generations from a common ancestor, and then went on to this effect—­“But if this question is treated, not as a matter for the calm investigation of science, but as a matter of sentiment, and if I am asked whether I 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” (here, as the point became clear, there was a great outburst of applause, which mostly drowned the end of the sentence) “to discredit and crush humble seekers after truth, I hesitate what answer to make.”