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The following letter shows that Mr. Huxley's presence at this remarkable scene depended on so slight a chance as that of meeting a friend in the street; that this friend should have been Robert Chambers, so that the author of the Vestiges should have sounded the war-note for the battle of the Origin, adds interest to the incident. I have to thank Mr. Huxley for allowing the story to be told in words of his not written for publication.

T. H. Huxley to Francis Darwin.

June 27, 1861.

I should say that Fremantle's account is substantially correct; but that Green has the passage of my speech more accurately. However, I am certain I did not use the word "equivocal "*

The odd part of the business is that I should not have been present except for Robert Chambers. I had heard of the Bishop's intention to utilise the occasion. I knew he had the reputation of being a first-rate controversialist, and I was quite aware that if he played his cards properly, we should have little chance, with such an audience, of making an efficient defence. Moreover, I was very tired, and wanted to join my wife at her brother-in-law's country house near Reading, on the Saturday. On the Friday I met Chambers in the street, and in reply to some remark of his about the meeting, I said that I did not mean to attend it; did not see the good of giving up peace and quietness to be episcopally pounded. Chambers broke out into vehement remonstrances and talked about my deserting them. So I said, "Oh! if you take it that way, I'll come and have my share of what is going on."

So I came, and chanced to sit near old Sir Benjamin Brodie. The Bishop began his speech, and, to my astonishment, very soon showed that he was so ignorant that he did not know how to manage his own case. My spirits rose proportionally, and when he turned to me with his insolent question, I said to Sir Benjamin, in an undertone, "The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands."

That sagacious old gentleman stared at me as if I had lost my senses. But, in fact, the Bishop had justified the severest retort I could devise, and I made up my mind to let him have it. I was careful, however, not to rise to reply, until the meeting called for me- -then I let myself go.

In justice to the Bishop, I am bound to say he bore no

* This agrees with Professor Victor Carus's recollection.

malice, but was always courtesy itself when we occasionally met in after years. Hooker and I walked away from the meeting together, and I remember saying to him that this experience had changed my opinion as to the practical value of the art of public speaking, and that, from that time forth, I should carefully cultivate it, and try to leave off hating it. I did the former, but never quite succeeded in the latter effort. I did not mean to trouble you with such a long scrawl when I began about this piece of ancient history.

Ever yours very faithfully

T. H. HUXLEY.

The eye-witness above quoted (p. 237) continues:"There was a crowded conversazione in the evening at the rooms of the hospitable and genial Professor of Botany, Dr. Daubeny, where the almost sole topic was the battle of the Origin, and I was much struck with the fair and unprejudiced way in which the black coats and white cravats of Oxford discussed the question, and the frankness with which they offered their congratulations to the winners in the combat.” *

C. D. to J. D. Hooker. Monday night [July 2nd, 1860].

MY DEAR HOOKER, —I have just received your letter. I have been very poorly, with almost continuous bad headache for forty-eight hours, and I was low enough, and thinking what a useless burthen I was to myself and all others, when your letter came, and it has so cheered me; your kindness and affection brought tears into my eyes. Talk of fame, honour, pleasure, wealth, all are dirt compared with affection; and this is a doctrine with which, I know, from your letter, that you will agree with from the bottom of your heart. How I should

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have liked to have wandered about Oxford with you, if I had been well enough; and how still more I should have liked tɔ have heard you triumphing over the Bishop. I am astonished at your success and audacity. It is something unintelligible to me how any one can argue in public like orators do. I had no idea you had this power. I have read lately so many hostile views, that I was beginning to think that perhaps I was wholly in the wrong, and that was right when he said the whole subject would be forgotten in ten years; but now that I hear that you and Huxley will fight publicly (which I am sure I

*See Professor Newton's interesting Early Days of Darwinism in Macmillan's Magazine, Feb. 1888, where the battle at Oxford is briefly described.

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never could do), I fully believe that our cause will, in the longrun, prevail. I am glad I was not in Oxford, for I should have been overwhelmed, with my [health] in its present state.

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C. D. to J. D. Hooker. [July 1860.]

I have just read the Quarterly.* It is uncommonly clever; it picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts,

*Quarterly Review, July 1860. The article in question was by Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, and was afterwards published in his Essays Contributed to the Quarterly Review, 1874. In the Life and Letters, ii. p. 182, Mr. Huxley has given some account of this article. I quote a few lines:-"Since Lord Brougham assailed Dr. Young, the world has seen no such specimen of the insolence of a shallow pretender to a Master in Science as this remarkable production, in which one of the most exact of observers, most cautious of reasoners, and most candid of expositors, of this or any other age, is held up to scorn as a ‘flighty' person, who endeavours to prop up his utterly rotten fabric of guess and speculation,' and whose 'mode of dealing with nature' is reprobated as utterly dishonourable to Natural Science.'" The passage from the Anti-Jacobin, referred to in the letter, gives the history of the evolution of space from the "primæval point or punctum saliens of the universe," which is conceived to have moved "forward in a right line, ad infinitum, till it grew tired; after which the right line, which it had generated, would begin to put itself in motion in a lateral direction, describing an area of infinite extent. This area, as soon as it became conscious of its own existence, would begin to ascend or descend according as its specific gravity would determine it, forming an immense solid space filled with vacuum, and capable of containing the present universe."

The following (p. 263) may serve as an example of the passages in which the reviewer refers to Sir Charles Lyell:-"That Mr. Darwin should have wandered from this broad highway of nature's works into the jungle of fanciful assumption is no small evil. We trust that he is mistaken in believing that he may count Sir C. Lyell as one of his converts. We know, indeed, the strength of the temptations which he can bring to bear upon his geological brother. . . . Yet no man has been more distinct and more logical in the denial of the transmutation of species than Sir C. Lyell, and that not in the infancy of his scientific life, but in its full vigour and maturity." The Bishop goes on to appeal to Lyell, in order that with his help "this flimsy speculation may be as completely put down as was what in spite of all denials we must venture to call its twin though less instructed brother, the Vestiges of Creation."

With reference to this article, Mr. Brodie Innes, my father's old friend and neighbour, writes: "Most men would have been annoyed by an article written with the Bishop's accustomed vigour, a mixture of argument and ridicule. Mr. Darwin was writing on some parish matter, and put a postscript-If you have not seen the last Quarterly, do get it; the Bishop of Oxford has made such capital fun of me and my grandfather.' By a curious coincidence, when I received the letter, I was staying in the same house with the Bishop, and showed it to him. He said, I am very glad he takes it in that way, he is such a capital fellow.""

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and brings forward well all the difficulties. It quizzes me quite splendidly by quoting the Anti-Jacobin versus my Grandfather. You are not alluded to, nor, strange to say, Huxley; and I can plainly see, here and there, -'s hand. The concluding pages will make Lyell shake in his shoes. By Jove, if he sticks to us, he will be a real hero. Good-night. Your well-quizzed, but not sorrowful, and affectionate friend, C. D.

I can see there has been some queer tampering with the review, for a page has been cut out and reprinted.

The following extract from a letter of Sept. 1st, 1860, is of interest, not only as showing that Lyell was still conscientiously working out his conversion, but also and especially as illustrating the remarkable fact that hardly any of my father's critics gave him any new objections-so fruitful had been his ponderings of twenty years:

"I have been much interested by your letter of the 28th, received this morning. It has delighted me, because it demonstrates that you have thought a good deal lately on Natural Selection. Few things have surprised me more than the entire paucity of objections and difficulties new to me in the published reviews. Your remarks are of a different stamp and new to me."

C. D. to Asa Gray. [Hartfield, Sussex] July 22nd [1860].

MY DEAR GRAY,-Owing to absence from home at water-cure and then having to move my sick girl to whence I am now writing, I have only lately read the discussion in Proc. American Acad., * and now I cannot resist expressing my sincere admiration of your most clear powers of reasoning. As Hooker lately said in a note to me, you are more than any one else the thorough master of the subject. I declare that you know my book as well as I do myself; and bring to the question new lines of illustration and argument in a manner which excites my astonishment and almost my envy!†

I

* April 10th, 1860. Dr. Gray criticised in detail "several of the positions taken at the preceding meeting by Mr. [J. A.] Lowell, Prof. Bowen and Prof. Agassiz.” It was reprinted in the Athenæum, Aug. 4th, 1860.

† On Sept. 26th, 1860, he wrote in the same sense to Gray :-" You never touch the subject without making it clearer. I look at it as even more extraordinary that you never say a word or use an epithet which does not express fully my meaning. Now Lyell, Hooker, and others, who perfectly understand my book, yet sometimes use expressions to which I demur."

admire these discussions, I think, almost more than your article in Silliman's Journal. Every single word seems weighed carefully, and tells like a 32-pound shot. It makes me much wish (but I know that you have not time) that you could write more in detail, and give, for instance, the facts on the variability of the American wild fruits. The Athenæum has the largest circulation, and I have sent my copy to the editar with a request that he would republish the first discussion; I much fear he will not, as he reviewed the subject in so hostile a spirit. . . . I shall be curious [to see], and will order the August number, as soon as I know that it contains your review of reviews. My conclusion is that you have made a mistake in being a botanist, you ought to have been a lawyer.

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The following passages from a letter to Huxley (Dec. 2nd, 1860) may serve to show what was my father's view of the position of the subject, after a year's experience of reviewers, critics and converts:

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I have got fairly sick of hostile reviews. Nevertheless, they have been of use in showing me when to expatiate a little and to introduce a few new discussions.

"I entirely agree with you, that the difficulties on my notions are terrific, yet having seen what all the Reviews have said against me, I have far more confidence in the general truth of the doctrine than I formerly had. Another thing gives me confidence, viz. that some who went half an inch with me now go further, and some who were bitterly opposed are now less bitterly opposed. . . . I can pretty plainly see that, if my view is ever to be generally adopted, it will be by young men growing up and replacing the old workers, and then young ones finding that they can group facts and search out new lines of investigation better on the notion of descent, than on that of creation."

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