A short history of nearly everything - Bill Bryson [198]
The showdown came on Saturday, June 30, 1860, at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Oxford. Huxley had been urged to attend by Robert Chambers, author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, though he was still unaware of Chambers's connection to that contentious tome. Darwin, as ever, was absent. The meeting was held at the Oxford Zoological Museum. More than a thousand people crowded into the chamber; hundreds more were turned away. People knew that something big was going to happen, though they had first to wait while a slumber-inducing speaker named John William Draper of New York University bravely slogged his way through two hours of introductory remarks on “The Intellectual Development of Europe Considered with Reference to the Views of Mr. Darwin.”
Finally, the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, rose to speak. Wilberforce had been briefed (or so it is generally assumed) by the ardent anti-Darwinian Richard Owen, who had been a guest in his home the night before. As nearly always with events that end in uproar, accounts vary widely on what exactly transpired. In the most popular version, Wilberforce, when properly in flow, turned to Huxley with a dry smile and demanded of him whether he claimed attachment to the apes by way of his grandmother or grandfather. The remark was doubtless intended as a quip, but it came across as an icy challenge. According to his own account, Huxley turned to his neighbor and whispered, “The Lord hath delivered him into my hands,” then rose with a certain relish.
Others, however, recalled a Huxley trembling with fury and indignation. At all events, Huxley declared that he would rather claim kinship to an ape than to someone who used his eminence to propound uninformed twaddle in what was supposed to be a serious scientific forum. Such a riposte was a scandalous impertinence, as well as an insult to Wilberforce's office, and the proceedings instantly collapsed in tumult. A Lady Brewster fainted. Robert FitzRoy, Darwin's companion on the Beagle twenty-five years before, wandered through the hall with a Bible held aloft, shouting, “The Book, the Book.” (He was at the conference to present a paper on storms in his capacity as head of the newly created Meteorological Department.) Interestingly, each side afterward claimed to have routed the other.
Darwin did eventually make his belief in our kinship with the apes explicit in The Descent of Man in 1871. The conclusion was a bold one since nothing in the fossil record supported such a notion. The only known early human remains of that time were the famous Neandertal bones from Germany and a few uncertain fragments of jawbones, and many respected authorities refused to believe even in their antiquity. The Descent of Man was altogether a more controversial book, but by the time of its appearance the world had grown less excitable and its arguments caused much less of a stir.
For the most part, however, Darwin passed his twilight years with other projects, most of which touched only tangentially on questions of natural selection. He spent amazingly long periods picking through bird droppings, scrutinizing the contents in an attempt to understand how seeds spread between continents, and spent years more studying the behavior of worms. One of his experiments was to play the piano to them, not to amuse them but to study the effects on them of sound and vibration. He was the first to realize how vitally important worms are to soil fertility. “It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world,” he wrote in his masterwork on the subject, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms (1881), which was actually more popular than On the Origin of