The coming of evolution : the story of a great revolution in science / by John W. Judd.

  • Judd, John W. (John Wesley), 1840-1916.
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The coming of evolution : the story of a great revolution in science / by John W. Judd. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    thrown on the origin of man and his history’—yet friends and foes alike at once drew what was the necessary corollary from the theory. It is as amus- ing, as it is surprising at the present day, to recall the storm of prejudice which was excited At the British Association Meeting at Oxford in 1860, after an American professor had indignantly asked the question, ‘ Are we a fortuitous concourse of atoms ? ’ as a comment on Darwin’s views, Dr Samuel Wilber- force, the Bishop of Oxford, ended a clever but flippant attack on the Origin by enquiring of Huxley, who was present as Darwin’s champion, if it ‘was through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey?’ Huxley made the famous and well-deserved re- tort :— ‘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 ashamed in recalling, it would rather be a man—a man of restless and versatile intellect—who not content with 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 prejudice138.’ The violent attack on Darwin’s views by the once-famous Bishop of Oxford was outdone, a few years later, by an even more absurd outburst on the