addressed his sarcasms, only to meet with a withering retort. For on the
Friday there was peace; but on the Saturday came a yet fiercer battle
over the "Origin," which loomed all the larger in the public eye,
because it was not merely the contradiction of one anatomist by another,
but the open clash between Science and the Church. It was, moreover, not
a contest of bare fact or abstract assertion, but a combat of wit
between two individuals, spiced with the personal element which appeals
to one of the strongest instincts of every large audience.

It was the merest chance, as I have already said, that Huxley attended
the meeting of the section that morning. Dr. Draper of New York was to
read a paper on the "Intellectual Development of Europe considered with
reference to the views of Mr. Darwin." "I can still hear," writes one
who was present, "the American accents of Dr. Draper's opening address
when he asked 'Air we a fortuitous concourse of atoms?'" However, it was
not to hear him, but the eloquence of the Bishop, that the members of
the Association crowded in such numbers into the Lecture Room of the
Museum, that this, the appointed meeting-place of the section, had to be
abandoned for the long west room, since cut in two by a partition for
the purposes of the library. It was not term time, nor were the general
public admitted; nevertheless the room was crowded to suffocation long
before the protagonists appeared on the scene, 700 persons or more
managing to find places. The very windows by which the room was lighted
down the length of its west side were packed with ladies, whose white
handkerchiefs, waving and fluttering in the air at the end of the
Bishop's speech, were an unforgettable factor in the acclamation of the
crowd.

On the east side between the two doors was the platform. Professor
Henslow, the President of the section, took his seat in the centre; upon