Apes, Angels, and Victorians [antikvár]

1 devolution in a Classroom 7'N June, i860, the British Association met at Oxford. Science was not very much at home there, and neither was Professor Huxley. Beneath those dreaming spires, he always felt as though he were walking about in the Middle Ages; and Professor Huxley did not approve of the Middle Ages. At Oxford, he feared, ideas were as ivy-covered as the buildings, and minds as empty and dreamy as the spires and quiet country air. Professor Huxley's laboratory was set squarely in the middle of the nineteenth century, in the narrow downtown London thoroughfare of Jermyn Street, which was as crowded and busy as Professor Huxley's own intellect. Reciprocally, Oxford did not feel in the least at home with such people as Professor Huxley. In fact, she felt rather desperately at bay between a Tractarian past and a scientific future. Newman's conversion to Roman Catholicism had opened an abyss of conservatism on one side; now Mr. Darwin's patient and laborious heresy had opened an abyss of liberalism on the other. The ground of sanity seemed narrow indeed. But sanity can always be defended. After all, there was something obviously ridiculous in a heresy about monkeys. Mr. Darwin himself was too ill to attend the meeting of the Association—as on a former even more important occasion, when