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As he said this, Huxley turned to his neighbour and said, “The Lord hath delivered him into mine hands!” On rising to speak, he first gave a forcible and eloquent reply to the scientific part of the Bishop’s argument. Then “he stood before us and spoke those tremendous words—words, which no one 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.” (Macmillan’s, 1898.) There is no verbatim report of this incident, but the varying accounts agree in outline.

(Extracted from Life of Huxley.)

One object of this book is to bring back the memories of the seventy-eighties—and of overwhelming interest at the time was the alleged conflict between religion and science. Through Darwin’s great discovery and Herbert Spencer’s world-wide extension of the evolution theory, so much was found covered by law that men were blinded to the fact that the essential question of causality, lying behind all law, was still untouched.