The following account is from an eye-witness of the scene.
"The excitement was tremendous. The Lecture-room, in which it had been arranged that the discussion should be held, proved far too small for the audience, and the meeting adjourned to the Library of the Museum, which was crammed to suffocation long before the champions entered the lists. The numbers were estimated at from 700 to 1000. Had it been term-time, or had the general public been admitted, it would have been impossible to have accommodated the rush to hear the oratory of the bold Bishop.[212] Professor Henslow, the President of Section D, occupied the chair, and wisely announced _in limine_ that none who had not valid arguments to bring forward on one side or the other, would be allowed to address the meeting: a caution that proved necessary, for no fewer than four combatants had their utterances burked by him, because of their indulgence in vague declamation.
"The Bishop was up to time, and spoke for full half-an-hour with inimitable spirit, emptiness and unfairness. It was evident from his handling of the subject that he had been 'crammed' up to the throat, and that he knew nothing at first hand; in fact, he used no argument not to be found in his _Quarterly_ article.[213] He ridiculed Darwin badly, and Huxley savagely, but all in such dulcet tones, so persuasive a manner, and in such well-turned periods, that I who had been inclined to blame the President for allowing a discussion that could serve no scientific purpose, now forgave him from the bottom of my heart."
What follows is from notes most kindly supplied by the Hon. and Rev. W. H. Fremantle, who was an eye-witness of the scene.
"The Bishop of Oxford attacked Darwin, at first playfully but at last in grim earnest. It was known that the Bishop had written an article against Darwin in the last _Quarterly Review_: it was also rumoured that Professor Owen had been staying at Cuddesden and had primed the Bishop, who was to act as mouthpiece to the great Palæontologist, who did not himself dare to enter the lists. The Bishop, however, did not show himself master of the facts, and made one serious blunder. A fact which had been much dwelt on as confirmatory of Darwin's idea of variation, was that a sheep had been born shortly before in a flock in the North of England, having an addition of one to the vertebræ of the spine. The Bishop was declaring with rhetorical exaggeration that there was hardly any actual evidence on Darwin's side. 'What have they to bring forward?' he exclaimed. 'Some rumoured statement about a long-legged sheep.' But he passed on to banter: 'I should like to ask Professor Huxley, who is sitting by me, and is about to tear me to pieces when I have sat down, as to his belief in being descended from an ape. Is it on his grandfather's or his grandmother's side that the ape ancestry comes in?' And then taking a graver tone, he asserted in a solemn peroration that Darwin's views were contrary to the revelations of God in the Scriptures. Professor Huxley was unwilling to respond: but he was called for and spoke with his usual incisiveness and with some scorn. 'I am here only in the interests of science,' he said, 'and I have not heard anything which can prejudice the case of my august client.' Then after showing how little competent the Bishop was to enter upon the discussion, he touched on the question of Creation. 'You say that development drives out the Creator. But you assert that God made you: and yet you know that you yourself were originally a little piece of matter no bigger than the end of this gold pencil-case.' Lastly as to the descent from a monkey, he said: 'I should feel it no shame to have risen from such an origin. But I should feel it a shame to have sprung from one who prostituted the gifts of culture and of eloquence to the service of prejudice and of falsehood.'