No real acquaintance

From Huxley's famous debate with the Bishop of Oxford regarding Charles Darwin's Origin of Species.

I had listened with great attention to the Lord Bishop's speech but had been unable to discover either a new fact or a new argument in it - except indeed the question raised as to my personal predilection in the matter of ancestry - That it would not have occurred to me to bring forward such a topic as that for discussion myself, but that I was quite ready to meet the Right Revd Prelate even on that ground - If then, said I, the question is put ... would I rather have a miserable ape ....

I asserted, and I repeat, that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for a grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would rather be a man, a man of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he had no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice.