No doubt your father’s words were better than these, and they gained effect from his clear, deliberate utterance, but in outline and in scale this represents truly what was said.

After the commotion was over, “some voices called for Hooker, and his name having been handed up, the President invited him to give his view of the theory from the Botanical side.  This he did, demonstrating that the Bishop, by his own showing, had never grasped the principles of the ‘Origin,’ and that he was absolutely ignorant of the elements of botanical science.  The Bishop made no reply, and the meeting broke up.”  ("Life of Darwin,” l.c.)

Account of the Oxford meeting by the reverend W.H.  Freemantle (in “Charles Darwin, his Life Told” etc. 1892 page 238.)

The Bishop of Oxford attacked Darwin, at first playfully, but at last in grim earnest.  It was known that the Bishop had written an article against Darwin in the last “Quarterly Review” (It appeared in the ensuing number for July.); it was also rumoured that Professor Owen had been staying in Cuddesdon and had primed the Bishop, who was to act as mouthpiece to the great Paleontologist, who did not himself dare to enter the lists.  The Bishop, however, did not show himself master of the facts, and made one serious blunder.  A fact which had been much dwelt on as confirmatory of Darwin’s idea of variation, was that a sheep had been born shortly before in a flock in the North of England, having an addition of one to the vertebrae of the spine.  The Bishop was declaring with rhetorical exaggeration that there was hardly any evidence on Darwin’s side.  “What have they to bring forward?” he exclaimed.  “Some rumoured statement about a long-legged sheep.”  But he passed on to banter:  “I should like to ask Professor Huxley, who is sitting by me, and is about to tear me to pieces when I have sat down, as to his belief in being descended from an ape.  Is it on his grandfather’s or his grandmother’s side that the ape ancestry comes in?” And then taking a graver tone, he asserted, in a solemn peroration, that Darwin’s views were contrary to the revelation of God in the Scriptures.  Professor Huxley was unwilling to respond:  but he was called for, and spoke with his usual incisiveness and with some scorn:] “I am here only in the interests of science,” [he said,] “and I have not heard anything which can prejudice the case of my august client.” [Then after showing how little competent the Bishop was to enter upon the discussion, he touched on the question of 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.” [Lastly as to the descent from a monkey, he said:] “I should feel it no shame to have risen from such an origin; but I should feel it a shame to have sprung from one who prostituted the gifts of culture and eloquence to the service of prejudice and of falsehood.”