Bully for Brontosaurus (41 page)
Read Bully for Brontosaurus Online
Authors: Stephen Jay Gould
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.
Farrar’s analysis of Huxley’s victory includes an interesting comment on Victorian sensibilities:
The victory of your father, was not the ironical dexterity shown by him, but the fact that he had got a victory in respect of manners and good breeding. You must remember that the whole audience was made up of gentlefolk, who were not prepared to endorse anything vulgar.
Finally, Farrar affirms the other major falsity of the official version by acknowledging the superiority of Hooker’s reply:
The speech which really left its mark scientifically on the meeting, was the short one of Hooker…. I should say that to fair minds, the intellectual impression left by the discussion was that the Bishop had stated some facts about the perpetuity of species, but that no one had really contributed any valuable point to the opposite side except Hooker…but that your father had scored a victory over Bishop Wilberforce in the question of good manners.
And so, in summary, we may conclude that the heroic legend of the official version fails badly in two crucial points—our ignorance of Wilberforce’s actual words and the near certainty that the forgotten Hooker made a better argument than Huxley. What, then, can we conclude, based on such poor evidence, about such a key event in the hagiography of science? Huxley did not debate Wilberforce at Oxford in 1860; rather, they both spoke, one after the other, in a prolonged discussion of Draper’s paper. They had one short and wonderful exchange of rhetorical barbs on a totally nonintellectual point prompted by a whimsical remark, perhaps even a taunt, that Wilberforce made about apes and ancestry, though no one remembered precisely what he said. Huxley made a sharp and effective retort. Everyone enjoyed the incident immensely and recalled it in a variety of versions. Some thought Huxley had won the exchange; others credit Wilberforce. Huxley hardly dealt with Wilberforce’s case against Darwin. Hooker, however, made an effective reply in Darwin’s behalf, and the meeting ended.
All events before the codification of the official version support this ambiguous and unheroic account. In particular, Wilberforce seemed not a bit embarrassed by the incident. Disraeli spoke about it in his presence. Wilberforce reprinted his review of Darwin’s
Origin
, the basis of his remarks that fateful day, in an 1874 collection of his works. His son recounted the tale with credit in Wilberforce’s biography. Moreover, Darwin and Wilberforce remained on good terms. The ever genial Darwin wrote to Asa Gray that he found Wilberforce’s review “uncommonly clever, not worth anything scientifically, but quizzes me in splendid style. I chuckled with laughter at myself.” Wilberforce, told by the vicar of Downe about Darwin’s reaction, said: “I am glad he takes it in this way. He is such a capital fellow.”
Moreover, though I don’t believe that self-justification provides much evidence for anything, we do have a short testimony from Wilberforce himself. He wrote to Sir Charles Anderson just three days after the event: “On Saturday Professor Henslow who presided over the Zoological Section called on me by name to address the Section on Darwin’s Theory. So I could not escape and had quite a long fight with Huxley. I think I thoroughly beat him.” This letter, now housed in the Bodleian Library of Oxford University, escaped all notice until 1978, when Josef L. Altholz cited it in the
Journal of the History of Medicine
. I would not exaggerate the importance of this document because it smacks of insincerity at least once—so why not in its last line as well? We know that 700 people crammed the Museum’s largest room to witness the proceedings. They didn’t come to hear Dr. Draper on the intellectual development of Europe. Wilberforce was on the dais, and if he didn’t know that he would speak, how come everyone else did?
Why then, and how, did the official version so color this event as a primal victory for evolution? The answer largely lies with Huxley himself, who successfully promoted, in retrospect, a version that suited his purposes (and had probably, by then, displaced the actual event in his memory). Huxley, though not antireligious, was uncompromisingly and pugnaciously anticlerical. Moreover, he despised Wilberforce and his mellifluous sophistries. When Wilberforce died in 1873, from head injuries sustained in a fall from his horse, Huxley remarked (as the story goes): “For once, reality and his brains came into contact and the result was fatal.”