Darrow was candid that he was not trying to win. His purpose in Tennessee, as he described it, was to put the statute and the reading of scripture behind it before a national audience, and an acquittal would have ended the case where it stood. When the judge excluded his expert witnesses he asked the jury to return a verdict of guilty so that the conviction could be appealed, and it did.
The examination of Bryan on the seventh day is the episode everyone knows and the transcript is more mixed than the legend. Bryan is not demolished; he holds a good deal of ground, objects effectively to the framing of several questions, and turns some of them back. What the exchange does show is a man being pressed on questions he had not previously had to answer in public, conceding on the length of the days of creation, and losing his temper, as did Darrow, to the point that the judge stopped proceedings. The whole passage was struck from the record the following morning as irrelevant to the charge, which it was.
Both men afterwards described it as unfinished. Bryan had a further examination of Darrow planned that never happened, and a closing argument he never delivered. Darrow, for his part, wrote that Bryan was a man of sincere convictions who had been placed by his own admirers in a position no one could have defended. The atlas records the trial as an argument between two positions with identifiable reasons, and does not award it.