Punch July 1885

Interiors and Exteriors No. 14

A Merry Meeting at the Royal Institution, Albermarle Street.

On Royal Institution "Interiors," Professor Adrian Desmond (note, December 1999) identifies THH as giving the lecture, "John Tyndall (bottom right, hands on knees, with telltale whiskers), and Joseph Hooker (extreme left, third up — ie two above Mr. Punch, with glasses and whiskers) Is that Clark Maxell (with finger pointed) talking to Tyndall? Just a guess on that one, and I'm even wobblier on that being bald-headed Herbert Spencer above Hooker. The significance of the monkey marionette may be that this was precisely the object that was waved by students at Darwin's LLD conferment at Cambridge in Nov 1877." Darwin himself seems to be portrayed in furthest left figure of top row.

See Presidential Address to the Royal Society. PRS 39 (1885): 278-99; Nature 33 (1885-86): 112-19.

This extract from Adrian Desmond’s Darwin p. 629-30:

In November Darwin did trek to Cambridge, to be honoured. By now even his Alma Mater had come round. Here robed Darwinians taught, organized the new labs, and placed their protigis in posts, while Hooker and his fellow examiners taxed students on natural selection. Nothing was left but to capitulate and award Darwin an honorary Doctor of Laws. On the day of the ceremony, Saturday the 17th, the Senate House was packed, everyone wanting to catch sight of the bearded sage. Undergraduates spilled out of the galleries, perched on statues, and stood in the windows. They strung a cord across the chamber and sent a monkey-marionette dangling above the waiting crowd. A Proctor climbed up and snatched it to antiphonal cheers and groans. Then a real `missing link' appeared, a fat ring garnished with gaudy ribbons, which remained suspended in mid-air throughout the ceremony. Darwin was ushered in, robed in red, and a mighty roar went up from the students He beamed back. The Vice-Chancellor followed in his scarlet and ermine gown and with two mace-bearers marched him up to the front, where he had taken his oath of matriculation fifty years before. The Public Orator came forward and uttered his panegyric to occasional `shouts and jeers.' `Most unmannerly,' Emma hissed, sitting in the audience with Bessy and the boys, even if it was a `tedious harangue.' Coral reefs, pigeons, fly-traps, barnacles, climbing plants, and volcanoes - all things Darwinian were decked in the purplest Latin prose. When the Orator paused for breath, a breezy voice in the crowd rang out, `Thank you kindly,' which brought the house down. This was Cambridge still, rowdy but respectable; and the Orator, like the zealous Proctor, kept up the dialectic, distancing the dignitaries from `the unlovely tribe of apes.' `We may yet have the consolation of saying with the Roman orator, who was a great philosopher too, ``Mores in utroques dispares''' - the moral nature of the two races is different.

The ritual conferment followed, and afterwards feasts and celebrations. Emma had a headache, so Charles backed out of dinner with the Cambridge Philosophical Society, even he was though the guest of honour. Hooker could not attend, but laughably his new wife sent a bunch of bananas from Kew. Romanes and all the Darwin boys except William stood in to hear Huxley take the toast with a dulcet attack on the university for failing to honour Darwin twenty years earlier. Or were monkey marionettes common toys, and therefore oft-used in caricatures of TH/CD/monkey ancestry? I wonder.