Bully for Brontosaurus

by Stephen Jay Gould

  3. Huxley than responded to Wilberforce’s arguments in loud, clear, and forceful tones.

  4. Huxley ended his speech with a devastatingly effective parry to the bishop’s taunt.

  5. Although Huxley said only that he would prefer an ape to a man who used skills of oratory to obfuscate rather than to seek truth, many took him to mean (and some thought he had said) that he would prefer an ape to a bishop as an ancestor. (Huxley, late in life, disavowed this stronger version about apes and bishops. When Wilberforce’s son included it in a biography of his father, Huxley protested and secured a revision.)

  6. Huxley’s riposte inspired an uproar. The meeting ended forthwith and in tumult.

  7. Although Moore, to her credit, does not make this claim, we are usually told that Huxley had scored an unambiguous and decisive victory—a key incident in Darwin’s triumph.

  8. This debate focused the world’s attention on the real and deep issue of Darwin’s century—science versus religion. Huxley’s victory was a pivotal moment in the battle for science and reason against superstition and dogma.

  I have had a strong interest in this story ever since, as an assistant professor on sabbatical leave at Oxford in 1970, I occupied a dingy office in the back rooms of the Zoological Museum, now crammed with cabinets of fossils and subdivided into cubicles, but then the large and open room where Huxley and Wilberforce fell to blows. For six months, I sat next to a small brass plaque announcing that the great event had occurred on my very spot. I also felt strong discomfort about the official tale for two definite reasons. First, it is all too pat—the victor and the vanquished, good triumphing over evil, reason over superstition. So few heroic tales in the simplistic mode turn out to be true. Huxley was a brilliant orator, but why should Wilberforce have failed so miserably? Much as I dislike the man, he was no fool. He was as gifted an orator as Huxley and a dominant intellectual force among conservative Anglicans.

  Second, I knew from preliminary browsings that the official tale was a reconstruction, made by Darwin’s champions some quarter century after the fact. Amazingly enough (for all its later fame), no one bothered to record the event in any detail at the time itself. No stenographer was present. The two men exchanged words to be sure, but no one knows what they actually said, and the few sketchy reports of journalists and letter writers contain important gaps and contradictions. Ironically, the official version has been so widely accepted and unchallenged not because we know its truth by copious documentation, but rather because so little data exist for a potential challenge.

  For years, this topic has been about number fifty in my list of one hundred or so potential essays (sorry folks, but, the Lord and editors willing, you may have me to kick around for some time to come). Yet for want of new data about my suspicions, it remained well back in my line of processing, until I received a letter from my friend and distinguished Darwin scholar Sam Schweber of Brandeis University. Schweber wrote: “I came across a letter from Balfour Stewart to David Forbes commenting on the BAAS meeting he just attended at which he witnessed the Huxley-Wilberforce debate. It is probably the most accurate statement of what transpired.” I read Stewart’s letter and sat bolt upright with attention and smiles. Stewart wrote, describing the scene along the usual lines, thus vouching for the basic outline:

  There was an animated discussion in a large room on Saturday last at Oxford on Darwin’s theory where the Bishop of Oxford and Prof. Huxley fell to blows…. There was one good thing I cannot help mentioning. The Bishop said he had been informed that Prof. Huxley had said he didn’t care whether his grandfather was an ape [sic for punctuation] now he [the bishop] would not like to go to the Zoological Gardens and find his father’s father or his mother’s mother in some antiquated ape. To which Prof. Huxley replied that he would rather have for his grandfather an honest ape low in the scale of being than a man of exalted intellect and high attainments who used his power to pervert the truth.

  Colorful, though nothing new so far. But I put an ellipsis early in the quotation, and I should now like to restore the missing words. Stewart wrote: “I think the Bishop had the best of it.” Score one big point for my long-held suspicions. Balfour Stewart was no benighted cleric, but a distinguished scientist, Fellow of the Royal Society, and director of the Kew Observatory. Balfour Stewart also thought that Wilberforce had won the debate!

  This personal discovery sent me to the books (I thank my research assistant, Ned Young, for tracking down all the sources, no mean job for so many obscure bits and pieces). We gathered all the eyewitness accounts (damned few) and found a half dozen or so modern articles, mostly by literary scholars, on aspects of the debate. (See Janet Browne, 1978; Sheridan Gilley, 1981; J. R. Lucas, 1979. I especially commend Browne’s detective work on Francis Darwin’s construction of the official version, and Gilley’s incisive and well-written account of the debate.) I confess disappointment in finding that Stewart’s letter was no new discovery. Yet I remain surprised that its key value—the claim by an important scientist that Wilberforce had won—has received so little attention. So far as I know, Stewart’s letter has never been quoted in extenso, and no reference gives it more than a passing sentence. But I was delighted to find that the falsity of the official version is common knowledge among a small group of scholars. All the more puzzling, then, that the standard, heroic account continues to hold sway.

  What is so wrong with the official tale, as epitomized in my eight points above? We should begin by analyzing the very few eyewitness accounts recorded right after the event itself.

  Turning to reports by journalists, we must first mark the outstanding negative evidence. In a nation with a lively press, and with traditions for full and detailed reporting (so hard to fathom from our age of television and breathless paragraphs for the least common denominator), the great debate stands out for its nonattention. Punch, Wilberforce’s frequent and trenchant critic, ignored the exchange but wrote poem and parody aplenty on another famous repartee about evolution from the same meeting—Huxley versus Owen on the brains of humans and gorillas. The Athenaeum, in one of but two accounts (the other from Jackson’s Oxford Journal), presents a straightforward report that, in its barest outline, already belies the standard version in two or three crucial respects. On July 7, the reporter notes Oxford’s bucolic charms: “Since Friday, the air has been soft, the sky sunny. A sense of sudden summer has been felt in the meadows of Christ Church and in the gardens of St. John’s; many a dreamer of dreams, tempted by the summer warmth…and stealing from section A or B [of the meeting] has consulted his ease and taken a boat.” But we then learn of a contrast between fireworks inside and punting lazily downstream while taking one’s dolce far niente.

  The Bishop of Oxford came out strongly against a theory which holds it possible that man may be descended from an ape…. But others—conspicuous among these, Prof. Huxley—have expressed their willingness to accept, for themselves, as well as for their friends and enemies, all actual truths, even the last humiliating truth of a pedigree not registered in the Herald’s College. The dispute has at least made Oxford uncommonly lively during the week.

  The next issue, July 14, devotes a full page of tiny type to Dr. Draper and his aftermath—the longest eyewitness account ever penned. The summary of Wilberforce’s remarks indicates that his half-hour oration was not confined to gibe and rhetoric, but primarily presented a synopsis of the competent (if unoriginal) critique of the Origin that he later published in the Quarterly Review. The short paragraph allotted to Huxley’s reply does not mention the famous repartee—an omission of no great import in a press that, however detailed, could be opaquely discreet. But the account of Huxley’s words affirms what all letter writers (see below) also noted—that Huxley spoke briefly and presented no detailed refutation of the bishop’s arguments. Instead, he focused his remarks on the logic of Darwin’s argument, asserting that evolution was no mere speculation, but a theory supported by copious evidence even if the process of transmutation
could not be directly observed.

  By the standard account, chaos should now break out, FitzRoy should jump up raving, and Henslow should gavel the meeting closed. No such thing; the meeting went on. FitzRoy took the podium in his turn. Two other speakers followed. And then, the true climax—not entirely omitted in Francis Darwin’s “official” version so many years later, but so relegated to a few lines of afterthought that the incident simply dropped out of most later accounts—leading to the popular impression that Huxley’s riposte had ended the meeting. Henslow turned to Joseph Hooker, the botanist of Darwin’s inner circle, and asked him “to state his view of the botanical aspect of the question.”

  The Athenaeum gave Hooker’s remarks four times the coverage awarded to Huxley. It was Hooker who presented a detailed refutation of Wilberforce’s specific arguments. It was Hooker who charged directly that the bishop had distorted and misunderstood Darwin’s theory. We get some flavor of Hooker’s force and effectiveness from a section of the Athenaeum’s report:

  In the first place, his Lordship, in his eloquent address, had as it appeared to him [Hooker], completely misunderstood Mr. Darwin’s hypothesis: his Lordship intimated that this maintained the doctrine of the transmutation of existing species one into another, and had confounded this with that of the successive development of species by variation and natural selection. The first of these doctrines was so wholly opposed to the facts, reasonings and results of Mr. Darwin’s work, that he could not conceive how any one who had read it could make such a mistake—the whole book, indeed, being a protest against that doctrine.

  Moreover, it was Hooker who presented the single most effective debating point against Wilberforce (according to several eyewitness accounts) by stating publicly that he had long opposed evolution but had been led to the probable truth of Darwin’s claim by so many years of direct experience with the form and distribution of plants. The bishop did not respond, and Henslow closed the meeting after Hooker’s successful speech.

  When we turn to the few letters of eyewitnesses, we find the Athenaeum account affirmed, the official story further compromised, and some important information added—particularly on the exchange about apes and ancestors. We must note, first of all, that the three letters most commonly cited—those of Green, Fawcett, and Hooker himself—were all written by participants or strong partisans of Darwin’s side. For example, future historian J. R. Green, source of the standard version for Huxley’s actual words, began his account (to the geologist W. Boyd Dawkins) with a lovely Egyptian metaphor of fealty to Darwin:

  On Saturday morning I met Jenkins going to the Museum. We joined company, and he proposed going to Section D, the Zoology, etc. “to hear the Bishop of Oxford smash Darwin.” “Smash Darwin! Smash the Pyramids,” said I in great wrath….

  (These one-sided sources make Balfour Stewart’s neglected letter all the more important—for he was the only uncommitted scientist who reported his impressions right after the debate.)

  We may draw from these letters, I believe, three conclusions that further refute the official version. First, Huxley’s words may have rung true, but his oratory was faulty. He was ill at ease (his great career as a public speaker lay in the future). He did not project; many in the audience did not hear what he said. Hooker wrote to Darwin on July 2:

  Well, Sam Oxon [short for Oxoniensis, Latin for “of Oxford,” Wilberforce’s ecclesiastical title] got up and spouted for half an hour with inimitable spirit, ugliness and emptiness and unfairness…. Huxley answered admirably and turned the tables, but he could not throw his voice over so large an assembly, nor command the audience; and he did not allude to Sam’s weak points nor put the matter in a form or way that carried the audience.

  The chemist A. G. Vernon-Harcourt could not recall Huxley’s famous words many years later because he had not heard them over the din. He wrote to Leonard Huxley: “As the point became clear, there was a great burst of applause, which mostly drowned the end of the sentence.”

  Second, for all the admitted success of Huxley’s great moment, Hooker surely made the more effective rebuttal—and the meeting ended with his upbeat. I hesitate to take Hooker’s own account at face value, but he was so scrupulously modest and self-effacing, and so willing to grant Huxley all the credit later on as the official version congealed, that I think we may titrate the adrenaline of his immediate joy with the modesty of his general bearing and regard his account to Darwin as pretty accurate:

  My blood boiled, I felt myself a dastard; now I saw my advantage; I swore to myself that I would smite that Amalekite, Sam, hip and thigh…. There and then I smashed him amid rounds of applause. I hit him in the wind and then proceeded to demonstrate in a few words: (1) that he could never have read your book, and (2) that he was absolutely ignorant of the rudiments of Bot [botanical] Science. I said a few more on the subject of my own experience and conversion,…Sam was shut up—had not one word to say in reply, and the meeting was dissolved forthwith [Hooker’s italics].

  Third, and most important, we do not really know what either man said in the famous exchange about apes and ancestors. Huxley’s retort is not in dispute. The eyewitness versions differ substantially in wording, but all agree in content. We might as well cite Green’s version, if only because it became canonical when Huxley himself “approved” it for Francis Darwin’s biography of his father:

  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 points at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.

  Huxley later demurred only about the word “equivocal,” asserting that he would not have besmirched the bishop’s competence in matters of religion.

  Huxley’s own, though lesser-known version (in a brief letter written to his friend Dyster on September 9, 1860) puts the issue more succinctly, but to the same effect:

  If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessed of great means of influence and yet who employs those faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion—I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.

  But what had Wilberforce said to incur Huxley’s wrath? Quite astonishingly, on this pivotal point of the entire legend, we have nothing but a flurry of contradictory reports. No two accounts coincide. All mention apes and grandfathers, but beyond this anchor of agreement, we find almost every possible permutation of meaning.

  We don’t know, first of all, whether or not Wilberforce committed that most dubious imposition upon Victorian sensibilities by daring to mention female ancestry from apes—that is, did he add grandmothers or speak only of grandfathers? Several versions cite only the male parent, as in Green’s letter: “He [Wilberforce] had been told that Professor Huxley had said that he didn’t see that it mattered much to a man whether his grandfather was an ape or not. Let the learned professor speak for himself.” Yet, I am inclined to the conclusion that Wilberforce must have said something about grandmothers. The distaff side of descent occurs in several versions, Balfour Stewart’s neglected letter in particular (see earlier citation), by disinterested observers or partisans of Wilberforce. I can understand why opponents might have delighted in such an addition (“merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative,” as Pooh-Bah liked to say). But why should sympathetic listeners remember such a detail if the bishop had not included it himself?

  But, far more important, it seems most unlikely that the central claim of the official version can be true—namely,
that Wilberforce taunted Huxley by asking him pointedly whether he could trace his personal ancestry from grandparents back to apes (made all the worse if the bishop really asked whether he could trace it on his mother’s side). No contemporary account puts the taunt quite so baldly. The official version cites a letter from Lyell (who was not there) since the anonymous eyewitness (more on him later) who supplied Francis Darwin’s account could not remember the exact words. Lyell wrote: “The Bishop asked whether Huxley was related by his grandfather’s or grandmother’s side to an ape.” The other common version of this taunt was remembered by Isabel Sidgwick in 1898: “Then, turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey?”

  We will never know for sure, but the memories of Canon Farrar seem so firm and detailed, and ring so true to me, that I shall place my money on his version. Farrar was a liberal clergyman who once organized a meeting for Huxley to explain Darwinism to fellow men of the cloth. His memories, written in 1899 to Leonard Huxley, are admittedly forty years old, but his version makes sense of many puzzles and should be weighted well on that account—especially since he regarded Huxley as the victor and did not write to reconstruct history in the bishop’s cause. Farrar wrote, taking the official version of Wilberforce’s taunt to task:

  His words are quite misquoted by you (which your father refuted). They did not appear vulgar, nor insolent nor personal, but flippant. He had been talking of the perpetuity of species in birds [a correct memory since all agree that Wilberforce criticized Darwin on the breeds of pigeons in exactly this light]: and then denying a fortiori the derivation of the species Man from Ape, he rhetorically invoked the help of feeling: and said (I swear to the sense and form of the sentence, if not to the words) “If anyone were to be willing to trace his descent through an ape as his grandfather, would he be willing to trace his descent similarly on the side of his grandmother.” It was (you see) the arousing of antipathy about degrading women to the Quadrumana [four-footed apes]. It was not to the point, but it was the purpose. It did not sound insolent, but unscientific and unworthy of the zoological argument which he had been sustaining. It was a bathos. Your father’s reply…showed that there was a vulgarity as well as a folly in the Bishop’s words; and the impression distinctly was, that the Bishop’s party as they left the room, felt abashed; and recognized that the Bishop had forgotten to behave like a gentleman.