On a Saturday in June 1860, at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Oxford, a session on a paper about the intellectual development of Europe turned into a discussion of Darwin's book, published seven months earlier. Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford and an accomplished amateur naturalist who had written a substantial and critical review of the Origin, spoke against. Thomas Henry Huxley spoke for. Joseph Hooker also spoke, and afterwards wrote to Darwin claiming that he himself had demolished the bishop and that Huxley had been inaudible.
The room was crowded and hot, several people spoke, and a woman is said to have fainted. Beyond that, the details are surprisingly hard to establish. The contemporary press reports are brief and do not describe a decisive confrontation. Nobody present wrote a detailed account at the time. The famous exchange, in which Wilberforce asked whether Huxley claimed descent from an ape through his grandfather or his grandmother, and Huxley replied that he would rather have an ape for an ancestor than a man who used his gifts to obscure the truth, comes from recollections written decades later, and the versions differ in wording.
Darwin himself was not there. He was ill, as usual, and learned about it by letter.