T-H-HUXLEY'S FAMOUS ANSWER TO BISHOP WILBERFORCE
Six months after the publication of Darwin's Origin, Bishop Wilberforce addressed the British Association for the Advancement of Science, attempting in his presentation to crush the newly born Darwinists. At the conclusion of his speech Wilberforce turned to T.H.Hux1ey, seated in the audience, and with smiling insolence begged to know, "Was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey?" Huxley struck his knee with his hand and remarked to an old friend seated beside him, "The Lord hath delivered him into mine hand." whereupon Huxley was called upon to rise and speak. Huxley recorded his answer to Wilberforce's taunt in a letter to a friend: "Has the rumor of the (Darwinist) row reached you? It was great fun--I had said that I could not see what difference it would make to my moral responsibility if I had an ape for a grandfather 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 & influence & yet who employs those faculties & that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion-I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape. Whereupon there was inextinguishable laughter among the people and they listened to the rest of my argument with the greatest attention."

EXCERPT FROM T.H.HUXLEY'S EVIDENCE AS TO MAN'S PLACE IN NATURE
We are told by those who assume authority in these matters, that the belief in the unity of origin of man and brutes involves the brutalization and degradation of the former. But is this really so? Could not a sensible child confute by obvious arguments, the shallow rhetoricians who would force this conclusion upon us? Is it, indeed, true, that the Poet, or the Philosopher, or the Artist whose genius is the glory of his age, is degraded from his high estate by the undoubted historical probability, not to say certainty, that he is the direct descendant of some naked and bestial savage. whose intelligence was just sufficient to make him a little more cunning than the Fox, and by so much more dangerous than the Tiger?

Or is he bound to howl and grovel on all fours because of the wholly unquestionable fact, that he was once a fertilized egg cell, which no ordinary power of discrimination could distinguish from that of a Dog?

Or is the philanthropist, or the saint, to give up his endeavors to lead a noble life, because the simplest study of man's nature reveals, at its foundation, all the selfish passions, and fierce appetites of the merest quadruped? Is mother-love vile because a hen shows it, or fidelity base because dogs possess it? (As Mark Twain wrote, "Heaven goes by favor; if it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in." --Ed) The common sense of the mass of mankind will answer these questions without a moment's hesitation. Healthy humanity, finding itself hard pressed to escape from real sin and degradation, will leave the brooding over speculative pollution to the cynics and the "righteous overmuch" who, disagreeing in everything else, unite in blind insensibility to the nobleness of the visible world, and in inability to appreciate the grandeur of the place Man occupies therein. (i.e., creationists criticize evolutionists for the ignoble and demeaning idea of "coming from apes," and say that man is more noble than that, and then have sermons where man is called a miserable worm worthy to be burned eternally in hell--Ed).

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