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Just two weeks later, on Saturday, 30 June, Wilberforce was scheduled to give a paper at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) at Oxford. Here was a chance for Darwinists to challenge him in public. Darwin, stricken with the chronic illness that plagued him for life and reticent of public battles, declined to attend. Huxley was urged to go in his place, and so he took up the gauntlet. Hundreds flocked to witness the showdown, with many more turned away at the door.

Wilberforce, coached by the anti-Darwinian biologist Richard Owen (coiner of the term ‘dinosaur’), delivered a fluent paper outlining many stinging criticisms of Darwin’s theory. It was at the end of this speech, according to accounts, that he upped the stakes with a thinly veiled insult to Huxley. No precise transcript of the meeting exists, but one particularly popular account was that of Isabel Sidgwick, presented in MacMillan’s Magazine nearly 40 years later: ‘turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey?’ This was rough stuff for a Victorian audience, but the crowd was reportedly already raucous, with undergraduates chanting ‘Monkey! Monkey!’ provocatively.