Toward the close of 1859, Darwin's "Origin of Species" was published. It
raised a great outcry in England; and Huxley immediately came forward as
chief defender of the faith therein set forth. He took part in debates
on this subject, the most famous of which was the one between himself
and Bishop Wilberforce at Oxford. The Bishop concluded his speech
by turning to Huxley and asking, "Was it through his grandfather or
grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey?" Huxley, as is
reported by an eye-witness, "slowly and deliberately arose. A slight
tall figure, stern and pale, very quiet and grave, he stood before us
and spoke those tremendous words. . . . He was not ashamed to have a
monkey for an ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a
man who used great gifts to obscure the truth." Another story indicates
the temper of that time. Carlyle, whose writing had strongly influenced
Huxley, and whom Huxley had come to know, could not forgive him for his
attitude toward evolution. One day, years after the publication of Man's
Place in Nature, Huxley, seeing Carlyle on the other side of the street,
a broken, pathetic figure, walked over and spoke to him. The old man
merely remarked, "You're Huxley, aren't you? the man that says we are
all descended from monkeys," and passed on. Huxley, however, saw nothing
degrading to man's dignity in the theory of evolution. In a wonderfully
fine sentence he gives his own estimate of the theory as it affects
man's future on earth. "Thoughtful men once escaped from the blinding
influences of traditional prejudices, will find in the lowly stock
whence man has sprung the best evidence of the splendour of his
capacities; and will discover, in his long progress through the past, a
reasonable ground of faith in his attainment of a nobler future." As
a result of all these controversies on The Origin of Species and of
investigations to uphold Darwin's theory, Huxley wrote his first book,
already mentioned, Man's Place in Nature.