doubt as to what it was. He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his
ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used
great gifts to obscure the truth. No one doubted his meaning, and the
effect was tremendous. One lady fainted and had to be carried out; I,
for one, jumped out of my seat.

The fullest and probably most accurate account of these concluding words
is the following, from a letter of the late John Richard Green, then an
undergraduate, to his friend, afterwards Professor Boyd Dawkins (The
writer in "Macmillan's" tells me: "I cannot quite accept Mr. J.R.
Green's sentences as your father's; though I didn't doubt that they
convey the sense; but then I think that only a shorthand writer could
reproduce Mr. Huxley's singularly beautiful style--so simple and so
incisive. The sentence given is much too 'Green.'")]

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 point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to
religious prejudice. (My father once told me that he did not remember
using the word "equivocal" in this speech. (See his letter below.) The
late Professor Victor Carus had the same impression, which is
corroborated by Professor Farrar.) (As the late Henry Fawcett wrote in
"Macmillan's Magazine," 1860:--"The retort was so justly deserved, and
so inimitable in its manner, that no one who was present can ever forget
the impression that it made.")